Charles Trevelyan, the civil servant with most direct responsibility for the government’s handling of the famine, described it in 1848 as “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence”, which laid bare “the deep and inveterate root of social evil”; the Famine, he affirmed, was “the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected. God grant that the generation to which this opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part…”
This summer across New England we have been afflicted by an unusual agriculture condition, the “late blight”, which has the potential to cause major failures of the tomato and potato crops. It has become commonplace for the news coverage of the late blight to refer to the best known outbreak of late blight, in Ireland in 1845.
It has also been commonplace for news coverage to refer to late blight as the condition “which caused the Irish potato famine in the mid-19th century”. “The crop disease — the same that caused the Irish potato famine — is not unusual, but arrived in the region early this year”.
In fact, there is no question that the blight did not cause the Famine. True, it caused the failure of the Irish potato crop, but the only serious question of the cause of the Famine was whether it was the result of an intentional program of genocide by the English, or was simply caused by a callous indifference to the suffering and starvation that English policies imposed on the subjugated Irish population.
The quote that opens this essay is as good an example as any of the argument in favor of genocide: the very man charged with responsibility for famine relief was contemplating with glee the prospect of the death by starvation of millions of Ireland, with his only regret being that the number of deaths might be insufficient to suit his purposes. In 1996 Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote a report commissioned by the New York-based Irish Famine/Genocide Committee, that concluded “Clearly, during the years 1845 to 1850, the British government pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland with intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnic and racial group commonly known as the Irish People…. Therefore, during the years 1845 to 1850 the British government knowingly pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland that constituted acts of genocide against the Irish people within the meaning of Article II (c) of the 1948 [Hague] Genocide Convention.”
Given the public statements of those in power in England I find it hard to credit the idea that the Great Hunger was not caused by a deliberate program of genocide. While English imperialists did not create or engineer the blight, they undoubtedly took advantage of the crop failure to reduce what they saw as Irish overpopulation and to restructure the agriculture industry and system of land ownership in Ireland.
Genocide? Whatever your answer, it is clear that it was not the blight that caused the Famine. The American press should know better.
Might as well believe the Birthers and concede that Barack O’Bama was born in Ireland in Black ’47 if you believe the intentional starvation of over a million people was not genocide. It was the very definition of genocide. It was not a “Famine” as we understand or use the word. Ireland was rich with food throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and Ireland was a major food exporter to Britain throughout the period of forced starvation.
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In 1845, a year of potato blight in Ireland, 26 MILLION bushels of corn were exported from Ireland to Britain along w/257,257 sheep. The following year 480,827 swine and 186,483 oxen were exported to Britain. See,
Ireland Before and After the Famine, by Cormac O’Grada at 28.
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Cecil Woodham-Smith, considered by many to be the (or one of the) preeminent authorities on the Irish Famine, wrote in The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-1849
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Ireland produced more than enough food and wool to feed and cloth approximately eighteen million people during the period over a million people were forced to starve to death and million more were forced to leave their country.
The average monthly export of food from Ireland was worth 100,000 Pound Sterling, which is beyond my ability to calculate tonight in today’s dollars or euros. Throughout the five-year forced hunger, Ireland remained a net exporter of food.
Dr. Christine Kinealy, a fellow at the University of Liverpool and the author of two scholarly texts on the Irish Famine: This Great Calamity and A Death-Dealing Famine, documents:
— 9,992 calves were exported from Ireland to England during “Black’47,” which was an increase of thirty-three percent from the previous year.
— In the twelve months following the second failure of the potato crop, 4,000 horses and ponies were exported.
— The export of livestock to Britain (with the exception of pigs) increased during the forced hunger of the indigenous Irish.
— The export of bacon and ham increased.
— In total, over three million live animals were exported from Ireland between 1846-50, more than the number of people who emigrated during the famine years.
How is this for policy mandated forced starvation:
A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue and seed.
BUTTER:
Butter was shipped in firkins, which holds 9 gallons. In just the first nine months of 1847, Britain took 56,557 firkins from Ireland to Bristol, and Britain took 34,852 firkins from Ireland to Liverpool. That works out to be 822,681 gallons of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of “famine”.
If the other three months of exports were at all comparable, then we can safely assume that a million gallons of butter left Ireland while 400,000 Irish people were forced by British trade, and genocide policy to starved to death.
Even now one of the reasons for the spread of the early tomato blight (in addition to the weather) is getting a lot less attention than it should .The mass distribution of infected plants from one or two huge greenhouse sources in the South (Alabama ?) to the big box stores all across the East Coast. Patterns of mass distribution,mono-crops and everyday low prices gave early blight an early start .
In no way do I mean to equate the situation in 1850’s Ireland to the loss of a few tomatoes here ,but just point out how the root causes of any event can quickly disappear or be obscured .
The stuff, aminopyralid, a chemical in Dow Chemical’s Forefront and Pharaoh products, is used on grain and hay fields and lawns to kill weeds, such as thistle, dock, and clover. From the Fair ground blog:
When combined with late blight, it’s a double-whammy. For organic farmers, it’s a triple whammy, since they can lose their organic certification because someone who supplied manure for compost, fed their horse hay that came from a farm that had grown their organic hay in a field that had been sprayed 3 years earlier with this chemical.
Everyone in the chain does the right thing, but the soil is still contaminated, the crops die, and …
Luckily, Dow is being very upfront about how careful farmers need to be with this stuff (note, they don’t mention their lawncare products at all):
Note, also, how they entirely ignore the unintended effects of contaminated mulch hay being used on hay fields of farmers who are unaware that their fields will be contaminated by doing so, or contaminated manure from animals that ate hay contaminated these unintentionally contaminated fields.
Dow is responsible for the failures of a wide variety of crops this year, potatoes among them, all around the world. And, based to the experience in England last year, they knew it would happen, and allowed it to happen anyway.