There seems, based on the past record, to be more to famine than a mere lack of food. Hunger has always been at the door, even in an era of relative prosperity like our own. Do people starve because of over population as Parson Malthus theorized? Or is famine a by-product of civilization and the economic systems that arise as structural basis for a consumer and market based economy? Or, in fact, do the hungry simply die because of politics?…
The Irish potato famine and food as a weapon:
In 1846, crops failed all over Europe. Wheat, oats and barley were in exceedingly short supply, and rye and potatoes were a total loss. Even so, then as now, there was no absolute lack of foodstuffs. The Continental countries- with few of the laissez-faire inhibitions of the English- moved into the international market swiftly, bought maize, and drove up prices for all grain. In Europe, in 1846, there was hunger, but no starvation to compare of that of the Irish.
The higher prices, said Charles Edward Trevelyan, head of the English treasury, were a “great blessing,” that would help to limit consumption. But consumption hardly needed limiting. With little food available in any case, and little money to pay inflated prices, the Irish continued to starve, while grain ships were diverted from British ports to the Continent. In Kenmare, reports Woodham-Smith, Father John O’Sullivan “found ‘a room full of dead people’; a man, still living, was lying in bed with a dead wife and two dead children, while a starving cat was eating another dead infant.”
Some Irish rioted; some tried to form revolutionary groups; some tried to storm government grain depots, which were, on occasion, kept closed in order to avoid interfering with the free marketplace; some Irish killed their landlords; some engaged in pathetic terrorist tactics; most grew weaker and weaker from starvation. In 1847, typhus struck: faces swelled and turned dark, limbs twitched, high fever and delirium sent men and women jumping into rivers to cool their fevers; sometimes gangrene set in. Relapsing fever and fatal dysentery also plagued the wretched who huddled together in ditches and sod huts and workhouses.