First potatoes since blight due to arrive from Canada Maine officials admit they are 'nervous' about the threat of potato wart spreading to the state's top crop. The first Canadian trucks laden with potatoes bound for the United States will rumble off Prince Edward Island on Monday under intense scrutiny, six months after the discovery of a contagious blight in the crop. The blight, known as potato wart, has prompted an international showdown over the lowly potato, Maine's top crop, that only now is being resolved. It illustrates the perils of trade in an increasingly global economy. If there's another find, all bets are off,'' he said, on future imports of Canadian potatoes.
Risks are great.
We'd become an island just like Prince Edward Island. A lot is at stake in Maine. The potato is the largest agricultural product here, representing more than a fifth of all income, and the dominant crop in struggling northern counties such as Aroostook. Potato wart, a soil-borne fungus called synchytrium endobioticum, was first described in Hungary in 1896. The highly contagious and incurable disease has since been found around the world, contaminating fields in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and North Carolina, and previously found in Canada only on the island of Newfoundland in 1909.