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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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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