potato blight

British  

noun

1. a devastating disease of potatoes produced by the oomycete Phytophthora infestans and the cause of the Irish potato famine of the mid-19th century

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Example Sentences

Multiple factors caused the famine, including the potato blight that destroyed the main source of food, and the political and socioeconomic circumstances of British colonial rule.

From BBC • May 22, 2026

Even 175 years after Ireland's devastating famine caused by an introduced potato blight, we're still struggling to combat these diseases.

From Salon • May 31, 2023

The potato demonstrates a well-known example of the risks of low crop diversity: the tragic Irish potato famine when the single variety grown in Ireland became susceptible to a potato blight, wiping out the crop.

From Textbooks • Jun. 9, 2022

Von Hippel begins with efforts to tackle the causes of potato blight, which triggered the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, and vector-borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever and typhus.

From Nature • Aug. 30, 2020

They kept constantly asserting that the ravages of the potato blight were greatly exaggerated; and they eagerly seized on any accidental circumstance that could give them a pretext for supporting this assertion.

From The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) With Notices of Earlier Irish Famines by O'Rourke, John