The famous Irish Potato Famine was thanks to farming practices and P. infestans (among other things). But are the Colorado Potato Beetle and the climate crisis teaming up to bring about the next potato famine? Here's what research suggests.No, Niba, you don't need to continue; we get the point. You love potatoes.
The first part of the video is one of the stories I tell my students along with the Bananapocalypse, which I've blogged about more often here. On the other hand, I've only mentioned the Irish Potato Famine directly once in Food Day News from Overnight News Digest on Daily Kos 13 years ago and indirectly in Talk like Redd for Talk Like A Pirate Day, when I wrote, "I don't know how to break it to her, but potatoes will cause the Irish a lot of misery about 100 years in the character's future." It was about time I embedded a video about potato blight here, especially one that warns about the catastrophe potentially repeating and connects it to reduced biodiversity in crop plants and climate change. I only plan on teaching for another year, but I think it might be worth showing to my students. If so, welcome to blogging as professional development.
That's a wrap for today's topic. Stay tuned as I continue my Emmy Awards coverage with the nominees for Outstanding Structured Reality Program tomorrow. Queer Eye vs. Shark Tank!
Obviously any threat to the world's third-largest food crop is a serious concern, but this video hugely understates how much the Irish potato famine was exacerbated by politics. "Unhelpful policies adopted by their neighbors in the UK" doesn't begin to cover it. At that time Ireland was completely under British rule (part of the British Empire), a colonial possession under the heel of a government the Irish had no say in. The conservative British government at the time refused to provide any help at all to the starving Irish, partly motivated by racism (Celtic people were thought of as a different race at the time) and partly by a pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps Ayn-Rand-like mentality which was common in the ruling class at the time (this was later applied during a famine in British-ruled India, with equally disastrous results).
ReplyDeleteIf the colonial government had merely provided the normal level of food aid typical of what governments do in such situations, most of the deaths would have been prevented. If such potato crop failures were to occur today, presumably modern governments would do their job and provide help to the affected people.
Thanks for adding the needed context to the video. Yes, the British/English made things much worse by continuing to use Ireland as a resource colony throughout the famine, including making the Irish pay their rent in wheat and Ireland being a net exporter of food. They also exported those policies to the rest of the British Empire, as you pointed out. What they did in India, they did it in Ireland first.
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