Warming To Spur Potato Famine In The Andes?

From National Geographic:

When Tito Guillen Rosales was a young boy, his grandfather was a rich man, growing 50 bags of potatoes a year and sharing his surplus with community members who didn't have enough.

"But now his potatoes are covered with worms and plagues and he barely has enough to feed himself," said Rosales, 27, a farmer himself and the mayor of a Peruvian village at 11,000 feet (3,353 meters) in the Cordillera Blanca range of the Andes mountains.

"We are all becoming desperate to find a solution to the changes in the weather and climate that have brought these new pests," Rosales said.

Here in the Andean highlands scientists attribute warmer temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns to global climate change. These shifts are seriously affecting the health of tuber, or root, crops such as the potato.

Late blight, a fungus responsible for the Irish potato famine in the 1800s, appeared for the first time in Coyllurqui sometime in the last 20 years, surprising and flummoxing farmers such as Rosales and his grandfather.

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