Whenever I see a tragedy, calamity, crash or whatever I almost always see one common factor: a lack of diversity somewhere. In this case it was in domestic food production. Whenever you look in nature and say 'that looks like a healthy ecosystem' it is almost always a system that is diverse and conversely when you see an ecosystem in distress it is generally lacking in diversity. As far as I know, diversity is the only real long term survival algorithm out there.

[edit] I should point out that I am not commenting on the cause of that lack of diversity, just the result of it.