By Ocean Malandra
March 13, 2017
Most of us were taught in school that the Irish Potato Famine, which took place from 1845 to 1852, was simply caused by a previously unknown fungal blight (Phytophthora infestans) that wiped out the potato crop of the Emerald Isle just at a time when too much of the population was dependent on a single type of potato for daily sustenance.
While the blight did strike and take down most of Ireland’s potatoes, the truth is that Ireland was exporting more than enough food to feed everyone at the same time as the famine was happening. Run as a colony of the vast British Empire, Ireland was a colonial food-producing operation, much like India and the sugar islands of the Caribbean, but locals were not allowed to eat the very food they were producing.
“Ireland’s economy had always been made subservient to British interests”, Quinnipiac University Professor Christine Kinealy says. “Following the appearance of the potato blight, a number of people in Ireland requested the government to close the Irish ports to keep food inside the country. [The British] refused to do so on the grounds that merchants would bring food in under free market forces.”
“Of course, this did not happen.”
Potatoes were only one of the crops grown in Ireland and accounted for approximately 20 percent of agricultural produce”, Kinealy says. “Ireland produced large amounts of other foodstuffs − mostly for exportation to Britain.” “On the eve of the Famine for example, Ireland was exporting sufficient quantities of corn, wheat, barley, oats etc. to Britain to feed an estimated two million people. Clearly Ireland was producing an agricultural surplus.” Likewise, more than 800 million people around the world suffer from hunger despite the fact that we currently produce enough food to feed two or three times the global population. Like Ireland during the famine, these millions are starving because of bad policies and ideologies, not because there is not enough to go around.
(Adapted from: http://www.pastemagazine.com)