The Irish were cranking out plenty of the potatoes during the Great Famine, they just couldn’t keep them for themselves. The British required a certain volume of crops. When the blight knocked down crop yields the British kept taking their cut and the shortfall was left on the Irish, hence the starving. They used the same playbook in India (check out the Bengal famine).
Switching crops takes, minimum, one entire growing season, *if* you have all the seeds and equipment, which the Irish didn’t.
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