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The most obvious case seems to be potato blight which somehow got from the New World to Europe in the 1840s and killed millions of people due to famine.
That couldn't happen today of course because our agricultural systems are not dependent on a single crop and we can easily transport food from all over the globe.
Phylloxera is another example. There is still no way of controlling it even with 21st century technology - if it wasn't for the good fortune that vitis vinifera grows well when grafted onto the rootstock of American vine species with natural resistance (but which produce undrinkable wine) we would have lost >95% of our ability to grow wine.
As a (technical) Irishman and an oenophile, I am genuinely conflicted about whether potato blight or phylloxera is the worst thing to come out of America. But both make high-fructose corn syrup and The Phantom Menace look like nothingburgers.
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Cool. I wasn't sure of the cause of the potato famine. But if it is a case of human-caused invasive species of disease, then I would definitely call it one example of a catastrophe.
Complicating this is that it isn't just the potato blight which got from the New World to Europe via human action, it was the potato itself.
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