The geographic spread of famines has also reduced over this period, as we can see in these two charts, which give two ways of visualizing famine deaths by continent. While in earlier periods Asia suffered heavily from major famines, this came to a halt over the mid-20th century.
Paradoxically, over the course of the 20 th century famine was virtually eradicated from most of the world, whilst over the same period there occurred some of the worst famines in recorded history. This is because many of the major famines of the 20 th century were the outcome of wars or totalitarian regimes.
It is believed that from 1800 to 1850 some 1 million to 1 and a half million people left the country. The impact of the Famine was to greatly increase the number of those who were emigrating from the country.
The Irish Famine, which in Ireland became known as "The Great Hunger," was the great turning point in Irish history. It changed the society forever, most strikingly by greatly reducing the population. In 1841 Ireland's population was more than eight million.
About one million people died from starvation or from typhus and other famine-related diseases. The number of Irish who emigrated during the famine may have reached two million. Between 1841 and 1850, 49 percent of the total emigrants to the United States were Irish.
Although estimates vary, it is believed as many as 1 million Irish men, women and children perished during the Famine, and another 1 million emigrated from the island to escape poverty and starvation, with many landing in various cities throughout North America and Great Britain.
Between 1845 and 1855 more than 1.5 million adults and children left Ireland to seek refuge in America. Most were desperately poor, and many were suffering from starvation and disease. They left because disease had devastated Ireland's potato crops, leaving millions without food.
The famine and its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political, and cultural landscape, producing an estimated 2 million refugees and spurring a century-long population decline. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory.
In the first year of the Famine, deaths from starvation were kept down due to the imports of Indian corn and survival of about half the original potato crop. Poor Irish survived the first year by selling off their livestock and pawning their meager possessions whenever necessary to buy food.
As a direct result of the famine, the Irish population was reduced by half, from eight million to four million, through death and emigration; vast emigrant communities were established in Canada, Britain, the US and Australia; the Catholic church emerged as a dominant political and cultural force; English replaced ...
The Irish Famine caused the first mass migration of Irish people to the United States. The effects of the Irish Potato Famine continued to spur on Irish immigration well into the 20th century after the devastating fungus that destroyed Ireland's prized potato crops died out in 1850.
The History Place - Irish Potato Famine: Gone to America. Throughout the Famine years, nearly a million Irish arrived in the United States. Famine immigrants were the first big wave of poor refugees ever to arrive in the U.S. and Americans were simply overwhelmed.
The Irish Great Famine's Effect on The U.S. Economy was substantial. Irish immigration to the United States during the Great Famine in Ireland was substantial and had a lasting impact on the economy of the United States. In 1990, 44 million Americans claimed Irish ethnicity.
It is estimated that at the eve of the famine 30% of Irish people were largely or wholly dependant on potatoes for their food. Thus, when the Blight struck it was these people who had nothing to fall back on. In Connaught some have estimated that as many as 25% of the population died.
Donations to Ireland came from Jamaica, Barbados, St. Kitts, and other small islands. Donations were also sent from slave churches in some of the southern states of America. Children in a pauper orphanage in New York raised $2 for the Irish poor.
The Irish famine was the worst to occur in Europe in the 19th century. Gillespie, Rowan: Famine. Famine (1997), commemorating the Great Famine, sculpture by Rowan Gillespie; in Dublin. © Arap/Fotolia.
About one million people died during the Great Famine from starvation or from typhusand other famine-related diseases. An estimated two million more emigrated from the country.
Great Famine, famine that occurred in Ireland in 1845–49 when the potato crop failed in successive years. The Irish famine was the worst to occur in Europe in the 19th century: about one million people died from starvation or from typhus and other famine-related diseases.
The crop failures were caused by late blight, a disease that destroys both the leaves and the edible roots, or tubers, of the potato plant.
A disease called late blight destroyed the leaves and edible roots of the potato plants in successive years from 1845 to 1849. Read more below: The Mold that Wrecked Ireland. Late blight. Read more about late blight, the disease that destroyed Ireland’s potato crops.
The potato, which had become a staple crop in Ireland by the 18th century, was appealing in that it was a hardy, nutritious, and calorie-dense crop and relatively easy to grow in the Irish soil. By the early 1840s almost half the Irish population—but primarily the rural poor—had come to depend almost exclusively on the potato for their diet. Irish tenant farmers often permitted landless labourers known as cottiers to live and work on their farms, as well as to keep their own potato plots. A typical cottier family consumed about eight pounds of potatoes per person per day, an amount that probably provided about 80 percent or more of all the calories they consumed. The rest of the population also consumed large quantities of potatoes. A heavy reliance on just one or two high-yielding types of potatoes greatly reduced the genetic variety that ordinarily prevents the decimation of an entire crop by disease, and thus the Irish became vulnerableto famine.
Read more about late blight, the disease that destroyed Ireland’s potato crops.
Even before the Great Famine, Ireland was known for its high levels of emigration. Between 1815 and 1845 more than 800,000 left Irish shores in search of better life. During the famine this number swelled considerably to 1.8 million. Most emigrants were from the poor Irish-speaking regions of Ireland and were destined for the United States ...
Pre-famine, Ireland’s political landscape centred around Daniel O’Connell and his bid for Catholic Emancipation and repeal movement. However post-famine, it would take more than a decade for a resurgence of nationalist feelings.
Although fast growing, the Lumper was highly susceptible to phytophthera infestans (blight). This chink in the breed’s armour would prove to be detrimental in 1845, when widespread blight caused Ireland’s staple crop to rot in the ground. Seven years of hardship, disease and starvation ensued, as blight continued to infect ...
One of the most famous Famine Roads in Ireland is the Healy Pass (R574) in Kerry. Despite its past, the route is a popular tourist attraction as it boasts panoramic views of Bantry Bay and the Kenmare River. Healy Pass.
Because of this, diseases spread quickly resulting in high mortality rates. By the end of the famine in 1852, there were 163 workhouses in Ireland.
At the time, most of Ireland’s citizens were completely dependent on one staple food source – the Lumper potato. This potato breed was calorie-rich and flourished in the harshest of conditions, making it the staple food of both the agricultural and peasant classes.
Aside from influencing the cultural and political landscape of the country, the famine directly affected Ireland’s physical landscape. Even today Famine Roads, which were the result of forced labour by Irish peasantry during the Great Famine, scar the Irish countryside. These roads go nowhere and were built with no direction in mind ...
The Great Famine (1845-1852) was a truly modern famine and one of the greatest social disasters in nineteenth-century Europe . Over a million people perished and a further million and a quarter fled the country which, by the Act of Union in 1801, was an integral part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and ...
The Lumper potato, a staple of pre-Famine Ireland. Many visitors to Ireland on the eve of the Famine commented on the levels of poverty they observed in the Irish countryside. Some, like Asenath Nicholson, believed that Ireland was teetering on the edge of a great calamity such was the extremes of poverty that she witnessed.
Overcrowded workhouses were made to bear the brunt of Famine distress. The cramped conditions allowed disease to spread like wildfire. Built to deal with poverty in normal circumstances, they were unable to cope with a tragedy on the scale of the Famine.
Trevelyan was adamant that relief should be a local charge and should not be a continual drain on Treasury finances.
The arrival of the blight in Europe led to a partial failure of the crop in Ireland in 1845. A Tory government under Sir Robert Peel introduced a series of relief measures including the importation of Indian corn, the setting up of hundreds of relief committees in addition to the establishment of public works where people could earn money to buy food. The almost total failure of the crop the following year presented a different challenge to a new Liberal government under its Prime Minister Lord John Russell.
However, the worsening conditions in Ireland during the winter of 1846/47 and increasing press coverage of the suffering prompted Russell's government to change direction in terms of its relief policy. The public works were increasingly seen as ineffective given the rise in disease and mortality.
The population of Ireland declined from c.8.5m (8.7m?) in mid-1846 to 6.55m in 1851. In a limited number of parishes around Belfast, Dublin, Waterford and Cork small population increases are recorded, reflecting for the most part immigration into these city regions.
Perhaps the most significant economic impact of the famine was a change like landholding and agriculture. Before the Great Famine, the vast majority of Irish families suffered on farms that were less than two acres. They survived on what they could grow, mostly potatoes. However, after the famine, this was no longer possible. One of the Famine's main impacts was that farms became larger to ensure that they provided families with a sustainable level of income. Many landowners, who mostly lived in London, sought to exploit the situation in the Famine's aftermath. Many of their low tenants had left the land and their farms. The landowners sought to encourage livestock rearing on their estates, which was more profitable. Increasingly, Ireland moved from arable farming to livestock rearing. However, this led to a great deal of unemployment in the country and did not benefit the poor. As a result, Ireland remained a poverty-stricken country.
After the horrors of the famine, Irish people married later, and if they did not have a reasonable sized farm or chance of steady employment, they never married. As a result of these changes, Ireland had a high rate of unmarried and single people , which led to social problems, particularly high levels of alcoholism. [6]
Ireland in 1840 was largely a peasant society , where Catholic tenants worked the land of a Protestant landowning elite. Much of the agricultural land in the country was part of the estates of Protestant landlords.[2] The country was part of the United Kingdom and was ruled by a British appointed administration in Dublin Castle, who were under the London government's direct control. The country was overwhelmingly agricultural with little or no industry. Much of the population depended on the potato for their livelihood. The vast majority of the Irish population lived in conditions of abject poverty.[3] In 1845, the potato blight was inadvertently brought to Europe from South America. The potato blight arrived in Ireland in the summer of 1846. It caused the potato crop to fail in many areas. [4]
Potato Famine in Skibbereen, Ireland in 1847
By the winter of 1846, there was widespread hunger in rural Ireland. The British government began a relief program and purchased maize in large quantities to help the starving Irish. However, the potato blight caused the potato to fail again in 1847. The Irish poor starved in great numbers. Many traveled to urban centers in their desperation for food—< ref>Hickey, p. 350.</ref> A change in administration in London resulted in a difference in the British government’s relief program in Ireland and reduced the amount of food relief available in the country.[5] This led to ever more starvation in the country. The malnourished population began to suffer from various epidemic diseases such as typhus. As the rural poor sought food in urban centers they began to spread these infectious diseases, which led to high death rates in cities such as Dublin, Limerick, and Belfast. The potato blight continued to ruin the potato crop until 1850. By 1850, some one million people had died of starvation and disease, and Ireland had been changed forever.
The botanical cause of the Great Famine was a virulent fungus (Phytophthora infestans ), spread by the wind, that first appeared on the leaves of potato plants in September and October of 1845. The diseased plants withered with shocking speed. When the potatoes were dug up for harvest, they were found to be rotting.
Thirty years after the Great Famine, the twin spires of St. Patrick's dominated the skyline of New York City. And on the docks of lower Manhattan, the Irish kept arriving.
The Irish Potato Famine. The Irish Potato Famine, which in Ireland became known as "The Great Hunger," was a turning point in Irish history. It changed Irish society forever, most strikingly by greatly reducing the population. In 1841, Ireland's population was more than eight million.
Social Causes. In the early 1800s, a large part of the Irish population lived as impoverished tenant farmers, generally in debt to British landlords. The need to survive on small plots of rented land created the perilous situation where vast numbers of people depended on the potato crop for survival.
It is impossible to determine precise numbers of the dead from starvation and disease during the Potato Famine. Many victims were buried in mass graves, their names unrecorded.
Modern potato farmers spray plants to prevent blight. But in the 1840s, the blight was not well understood, and unfounded theories spread as rumors. Panic set in.
In the early 1800s, the impoverished and rapidly-growing rural population of Ireland had become almost totally dependent on one crop. Only the potato could produce enough food to sustain families farming the tiny plots of land the Irish peasants had been forced onto by British landlords.
The Famine was not only important for Ireland but for many other countries. The waves of emigrants that left Ireland as a result of the Famine, established new homes in North America, Britain, and Australasia and changed these societies.
The poor, because they were engaged in a monoculture, were unable to secure enough food for themselves and their families.
In 1845, the blight was felt hardest by those who lived in the poorest areas and on marginal lands, such as those in the upland areas. The blight decimated the food supply of the poorest of the poor and those who were least able to bear the loss of their precious potato crop. However, not all areas of the country experienced a disastrous potato harvest and some farmers managed to retrieve at least a portion of the harvest. This is evident from the different death rates across the country, in the period 1845-1850. Some 24% of the population emigrated or died in Connacht and 23% in the province of Munster. This compares to 12% in Ulster and 16% in Leinster [19].
Famine was not new to Ireland. Every few years, there was a partial failure of the potato crop or some natural disaster resulted in a famine. In the 1740’s, an unseasonable frost destroyed the crops in the fields [3]. This led to widespread hunger and epidemics and by the end of the famine, some 10% of the population died over a two- year period. There were also small and localized food crises in Ireland in the 1820’s and the 1830’s. However, the famine in the period 1845-1850 was to be an unprecedented one and was to change Irish history.
The Great Irish Potato Famine. The Irish Potato Famine, or the ‘Great Hunger’, was the last great famine in Western Europe and one of the most catastrophic recorded in that region. It led to the death of up to a million people and the emigration of two million people from the island of Ireland.
The blight was a novelty to many of the Irish peasants. Potato diseases were not unknown and they have caused partial failures in recent decades. The blight was beyond the experience of Irish farmers. They were amazed to find their potato blacked and inedible when they took dug out of the ground. Because of the great poverty of the poorest elements in society, many tenant farmers simply did not have any food reserves. Typically, when the harvest was gathered, people began to eat the potato immediately, this was because the supplies from the last harvest had already been eaten. Upon discovering the potato crop was ruined, many knew that they would starve. A large number of tenant farmers and laborers also did not have the financial surplus to help them over the crisis. The economy of many poorer areas of the country was based on a barter system and little money actually circulated in these areas and this meant that they could not purchase the available food. Those that did have some money were forced to make a decision whether to pay their rent to the landlord or buy food. The potato blight was a disaster for many families. This meant that when the potatoes failed that they did not have enough to eat and they and their families were at risk of losing their land and their livelihood. Many people immediately began to seek relief from their local community, it was traditional in Irish society to help those who were in distress, especially family members, and neighbours. At first, the Irish poor would share their resources and this helped many throughout the hard winter of 1854-1846. However, soon, people began to hoard their own supplies, as they began to run out of food. This mean that the traditional support networks, that had helped people in previous famines collapsed and this meant that many more people began to starve. People bemoaned the fact that traditional charity and neighbourliness had ended and people were even turning on each other like ‘wolves’ [14]. Some people became so desperate for food that they made the fateful decision to eat their seed potatoes. They were needed to plant next season’s potato harvest. When people ate their seed potatoes, then they would not have any potato harvest next season and they would be condemned to starvation. Within months of the first appearance of blight, it was clear that the situation for many of Ireland’s poor was disastrous [15]. At this time, it was very common for families to eat grass and nettles. The hungry often boiled nettles and ate them as a broth and this became very common during the Famine.
Irish society was shaped by the system of landownership. Land was the main source of wealth in the country prior to the Famine and continued to do so after it ended. The land was largely rented by Protestant landlords to Catholic tenants. Their holdings were often very small and it was not unusual for the tenant farmers to have only two or three acres of land. One in four Irish tenants had farms that were only 1.5-2 hectares in size. This group and their families made up the majority of the population, by some measurements over one-half of the nation, were subsistence farmers. Any chance event could reduce a tenant farmer and his family to penury and starvation. Another issue in Ireland was that often when a tenant died, they divided their lands, among all their children. This was an age-old Gaelic tradition. However, this practice of sub-division meant that over time, the holdings of the Irish cottiers was reduced in size each generation. There was not enough land for them to produce anything else than potatoes. This meant that they could not produce food for the market and their farms were used simply to provide for their food supply for the year- if they were lucky. Such was the hunger for land that more and more marginal land came into use, as in hilly and upland areas. At this time many of the islands off the west coast, such as the Arran Islands, became densely populated, as people desperately sought land. Before the famine, an official British government report indicated that poverty was endemic that some one-third of all Irish small farmers could not support their families after paying their rent. The majority of the poor lived in one or two roomed cabins. Despite this and other reports, there was nothing done to change the situation and the Irish poor continued to live in the shadow of famine and in wretched poverty [5]. Visitors to Ireland remarked that poverty was universal in rural districts as Skibberrean, County Cork especially in the hill areas, where one journalist witnessed the ‘the most dreadful privations’ in the early 1840s, even before the Famine [6]
In total, famines and episodes of forcible mass starvation have killed more than 104 million people worldwide since 1870, with an estimated 30 million dying from great famines in the last three decades of the 19 th century and 74 million during the 20 th century, according to estimates recorded by the World Peace Foundation’s Famine Trends Dataset.
Patterns of famine-related migration are even more complex than these cases imply. The different causal sequences that lead to famine also contribute to different patterns of migration. The mobility of the hungry is influenced strongly by the structure of rural livelihoods and varies according to the causes of the famine. For instance, places subject to recurrent food insecurity and famine, such as Sudan and the West African Sahel, have witnessed long-term trends of migration away from ecologically marginal areas on the desert edge to more productive areas further south, and from rural areas to cities. Such movements are not always limited by state borders, and communities and individuals also migrate transnationally in search of sustainable livelihoods. Literature on the Sahelian famine of the 1970s and among the pastoralist Afar and Somali of Ethiopia details how sedenterization of formerly nomadic peoples—a change in movement patterns rather than migration—resulted in the deprivation of a traditionally autonomous society. For the Gogo of Tanzania, colonial polices such as labor conscription stripped traditional agrarian societies of their autonomous ability to deal with the risk of food shortages.
The synopsis taught in Irish schools of the demographic impact of the Great Hunger that devastated Ireland from 1845-52 is as follows: 1 million dead, 2 million emigrants. Is it a general rule that famines generate mass migration or was Ireland the exception? Remarkably, despite long-standing demographic research into famine and intensive current interest in migration, there is no definitive answer. But there is urgent policy interest in the link between mass starvation and migration. After decades in which famines had declined almost to vanishing point, 2017 and 2018 have witnessed their disturbing return, perhaps most starkly surrounding the war-induced starvation unfolding in Yemen. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s economic collapse and the government's highly selective allocation of food and other essentials are causing unprecedented mass migration to the country’s Latin American neighbors, with reports of severe malnutrition and deaths from starvation.
Undoubtedly the most well documented and extensively researched case of a famine migration is that of the Great Irish Famine. The emigration of 2 million Irish between 1845-52 was predominantly long distance (to the United States and Canada) and permanent. Social and economic historians and demographers have researched this calamity in unparalleled detail. They ask why some Irish counties experienced greater levels of outmigration than others, what the trans-Atlantic passage to America was like, how did family and friends abroad facilitate mobility, and whether political authorities could have done more to facilitate migration as a form of relief.
The two global food insecurity and famine early-warning systems—the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Global Early Warning-Early Action (EWEA) report and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) —sounded the alarm in 2017 and repeated it earlier this year. According to the FAO, six countries/regions were at a high risk of their food security and agriculture deteriorating to the point of an emergency. Of these, Yemen, South Sudan, and Somalia were described as facing the “risk of famine.”
Thus, the lack of political support for publicly assisted emigration during the Great Irish Famine’s worst years—a dearth partially fueled by anti-Irish prejudice in Britain—meant that the most vulnerable were the least able to escape. And during the 1867-69 famine in the present-day Estonia, the regional government in fact increased restrictions on peasants’ mobility because population movement was not in landowners’ best interests. Turning to the more recent case of the Ethiopian famine of 1983-85, forced population transfers under the guise of food relief were a key feature of the counterinsurgency strategy of the military regime against rebels in the northern provinces of Tigray and Wollo. This state-led restrictive management of mobility did little to alleviate starvation while some external donors’ relief efforts unwittingly abetted forced resettlement. From the authors’ review, the politics of famine migration is however the least deliberately and uniformly studied aspect of the issue.
In Somalia and Ethiopia’s Somali region, a prolonged drought combined with armed conflict threatens the collapse of agricultural production and livelihoods. Conflict and ensuing mass displacement have set conditions for widespread starvation in South Sudan and northeast Nigeria. And in Yemen, the economic war waged by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to try to force the Houthi rebellion into surrender has brought the country to the brink of a disaster, described by UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Mark Lowcock as “an imminent and great big famine.”
Facts On How The Great Famine Changed Ireland 1 Irish emigration started Irish communities abroad in the U.S. and in Britain which, in turn, later influenced Irish affairs. Irish Americans for example supported Irish independence. 2 Traces of an era of monoculture that led to the Irish Potato Famine are left in the Irish landscape to this present day. All over the country, but especially in places with shallow and infertile soil such as in the westernmost counties, you will find traces of old lazy beds that were used to grow potatoes, such as those in the photo further down the page.
During the Great Famine, in the region of 2 million died, one million emigrated. Irish emigration continued and has done so, with only brief breaks, until this present day. Famine Memorial (An Gorta Mór) in Annaghdown, County Galway. County Galway was one of the counties that were hardest hit by the famine.
Traces of an era of monoculture that led to the Irish Potato Famine are left in the Irish landscape to this present day. All over the country, but especially in places with shallow and infertile soil such as in the westernmost counties, you will find traces of old lazy beds that were used to grow potatoes, such as those in the photo further down the page.
Before the Famine, the Irish language was still wide spread especially in rural and Western areas. After the famine, only about 5 percent of the population continued to speak Irish.
In terms of religion Catholicism in Ireland became even stronger after the Famine and, in a reaction to ‘souperism’ and years of oppression at the hands of the Protestant English, it became tied up with the sense of national identity. Another Irish trait became more ingrained during the Irish Famine- black humour.
County Galway was one of the counties that were hardest hit by the famine. Irish emigration started Irish communities abroad in the U.S. and in Britain which, in turn, later influenced Irish affairs. Irish Americans for example supported Irish independence.
The Land League movement started after the Great famine and continued for the remainder of the century led by Charles Stuart Parnell. It ultimately succeeded in achieving legislation that brought about some land ownership in the peasant class.