Crop diversity fruit trees and banana plants) are cloned. A single pest or disease could threaten a whole crop due to this uniformity ("genetic erosion"). A well-known historic case was the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1847, where a vital crop with low diversity was destroyed by a single fungus. Another example is when a disease caused by a fungus affected the monocultured 1970 US corn crop, causing a loss of over one billion dollars in production. A danger to agriculture is wheat rust, a pathogenic fungus causing reddish patches, coloured by its spores. A virulent form of the wheat disease, stem rust,
Plant disease resistance viable geographic range of pathogen species and cause some diseases to become a problem in areas where the disease was previously less important. These factors make modern agriculture more prone to disease epidemics. Common solutions include constant breeding for disease resistance, use of pesticides, use of border inspections and plant import restrictions, maintenance of significant genetic diversity within the crop gene pool (see crop diversity), and constant surveillance to accelerate initiation of appropriate responses. Some pathogen species have much greater capacity to overcome plant disease resistance than others, often because of their ability to evolve rapidly and to disperse broadly.