Blight
is one of the worst diseases of potatoes. It was partly the cause of the great
famine in Ireland (1845) in which tens of thousands of people died of starvation
because their main food crop - the potato - was wiped out for several years
in a row by blight. And now Russia is in the grip of a powerful new type of
the same blight. Small Russian farmers can't afford to spray with expensive
fungus-killing chemicals to try and control the outbreak [1].