Why were the Irish so dependent on potatoes as a staple food at the time of the Great Famine? Why couldn’t they just have turned to other grains as an alternative to stop more deaths from happening?
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After a few centuries of Apartheid rule (Catholics weren’t even allowed to own land), over 95% of the Irish population lived on land they didn’t own. That makes sense if you’re from a city, but Ireland is a rural country the size of Tennessee. This also predates any concept of “tenants rights,” and discouraged any improvement of land, as landlords would raise rents based on improvements made. If you built a house for your family to live in, your rent would go up to the point where you couldn’t afford to pay it, and you’d be kicked off the land while your landlord would keep the new house.
Most Irish didn’t pay rent in cash, they paid rent by working the land to raise crops for their landlord to export. They also weren’t paid wages; instead, they were given a small plot of land to grow their own food to survive. Irish cuisine changes at this point, and dairy disappears as cows take too much land to graze. Not so impoverished families can still afford pigs, but one crop takes hold. Potatoes yield 4 times as many calories per acre as the next best thing. In time, the entire population becomes dependent not just on potatoes, but one genetic variant of a potato: the Irish Lumper.
Over a century and a half, more and more people cram onto smaller and smaller plots of land. While the Irish don’t have access to cattle, large tracts of land are used to fuel the burgeoning corned beef industry (corned beef being a vital foodstuff for naval trade, as refrigeration doesn’t exist).
Potatoes fail all over the world for 5 years, starting in 1845. It starts in Mexico, then spreads to the USA, Continental Europe, then England and Ireland. The reason we don’t hear about potato blight in other countries is because they weren’t wholly dependent on potatoes to feed the entire working population.
The response by the English starts off with denial of the scale of the crisis, costing time and lives. Next is the conservative parliament refusing to interfere in the free markets. Ireland never stops exporting food during every year of the famine. The protectionist “corn laws” (“corn” referring to any grain) make the import of wheat/rye/barley either illegal or only possible with heavy tariffs, so English farmers don’t lose out to cheaper American grain. The Prime Minister attempts to get these repealed, but is defeated by parliament. He finds a workaround, buying up American Maize (corn), which is possible since no English farmers grow corn. This has a drawback. Since nobody in Ireland eats corn, only two mills in the entire country are setup to actually mill corn into edible grain. Also, if the modern American diet has taught us one thing: corn is barely nutritious crap.
The next fight comes over how the corn is to be distributed. The contemporary government started selling the corn at cost, but are soon replaced by a more conservative government that sells the corn at market rates. Not believing in handouts, the government starts a bunch of “make work” programs to give the population a chance to earn money for food. This includes building a bunch of roads to nowhere, which you can still see traces of today. This obviously doesn’t work, as a starving, now disease ridden populace (yes, disease runs rampant in malnourished people) cannot complete physical labor.
At its height, the population of Ireland was around 8 million. 1 to 2 million starved, with another 2 million leaving for Liverpool, then onto Canada and the US. Ireland lost about half its population, and still hasn’t surpassed its pre-famine population to this day.
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