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Ireland 1845: risky monoculture
"Only two things in this world are too serious to be jested on, potatoes and matrimony."
Irish saying
Until the beginning of July the season had been magnificent. Field after field of potatoes, covering the hills with their dark green leaves and purple flowers, radiated brilliantly. Then there was a change in the weather and a foul August arrived, with temperatures seven degrees below the seasonal average. The blight struck with no warning in the first half of September: in just a few days the fields were transformed into rotten stony heaps of withered stalks reeking of corpses. The potatoes were rotten, useless. Not one of the varieties was able to withstand the ravages of the blight. Ireland 1845: the entire nation's harvest was lost. The disaster became irreparable when the disease returned, more aggressive than before, the following year: in 1846 not a single potato plant was left in the whole of Ireland. At the end of the year the famine struck, bringing about a tragedy of proportions unknown in Europe since the time of the Black Death of 1348. The blight also hit potato fields in the rest of the Old Continent, but only in Ireland were the consequences so devastating. Why? In Ireland people grew almost exclusively potatoes; potatoes, together with milk constituted the peasants' only food. Cereals were consumed only by noblemen and the rich middle class city dwellers; the rest was reserved for export to the British mainland. The people's dependence on potatoes was total and had been for three centuries.
How did it come to this?
It was love at first sight. First landing on the island in the last 15 years of the 16th century, in the space of 50 years the potato had become the main source of sustenance and the very fulcrum of Irish life. The cold, wet climate and the loose humus-rich earth are not enough to explain the spread of the tuber, which in nearby England, as in the other countries of the Old Continent, was still a long way off from becoming a mass product. It was more the social climate that determined its success. In 16th century Ireland agriculture was undeveloped and almost exclusively at subsistence level. The population had been reduced to starvation from deprivation and the bloody struggles with England, which for 300 years had left the country in a perennial state of social, political and economic chaos.
Sowing the fields meant guaranteed ruin: whatever people attempted to grow would be trampled and destroyed; the harvests in the granaries could be looted and burned. This was the situation when the potato arrived. It was welcomed as a gift from Providence: it needed minimum effort in terms of time, labor and specific agricultural know-how. Nutrition, which had been previously based on meat and dairy products, underwent a radical change. The people's dependence on potatoes became ever greater over the subsequent centuries. The laws and restrictions imposed by the English at the end of the 17th century made the situation worse. The inherent danger of dependence on one food source began to manifest itself.
The risk of monoculture
In 1846 the population of Ireland numbered between eight and nine million. The famine, and later the typhoid outbreak, scurvy and cholera killed one million people. As in all cases where there is no nutritional bio-diversity, dependence on the single element is not only material, but also psychological. Not even in cases of extreme emergency were the destitute farming families able to consider alternative food sources. Without potatoes one died of starvation. Period. It is curious to see what happened in the coastal areas, which paradoxically were among the worst hit by the famine: the farmers were not capable of feeding themselves on fish unless it was accompanied by potatoes.
Hunger, together with a wrecked political system that denied subsidies and assistance to the farmers that occupied more than a quarter of an English acre, also caused a wave of emigration to the United States and, to a lesser degree, to the northern towns of England - Liverpool and Manchester saw a massive influx of Irish manpower, who remained segregated from the rest of society. This migration reached its peak in 1846 and 1847. It is estimated that, between death and emigration, the country lost two and a half million people. In the space of a few more years the population of Ireland halved.
(16/06/2006)
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