Should America stockpile grain?

Great Debates
21

I’d study the matter in a little more depth if I were you.

The Brits already owned the land and actually sent financial aid to Ireland.something that at that time was not common practice ,even if a disaster affected England,Scotland or Wales .

The Potato Blight brought back from the U.S. by emigrant ships affected not just Ireland but Britain and the Continent but hit Ireland so hard because of the "Lazy Man"farming practices of the rural population there.

That is a mono culture(Potatos)( plus usually a cow and a pig)which require a lot less work then a variety of crop types but even the tiniest infant could tell you that unless things went perfectly in everyway agriculturly,pestwise and weatherwise EVERY SINGLE YEAR any problem would wipe out the whole crop rather then just one vegetable element of it .

The Irish rural population themselves exacerbated their situation by routinely having very large numbers of children even by the standards of the time.

I have spent much time in Ireland and have a great many Irish friends but never once have I met any Irish person ever who has admitted that their own ancestors were the prime culprits for the severity of the famine on the Irish population but prefer instead to blame it somehow on the Evil English.

Not surprising really as the Irish educational systems text books including history books were published by a fairly prominent Nazi who had fled justice in Europe at the end of WW2 and been given a warm welcome by the Irish government.

The lies,distortions and twisting of reality put into young minds as fact via the Irish schools system were a great recruiting agent for Irish Nationalist terrorists and no doubt prolonged their murdering and torturing of innocent civilians in the name of “Irish Liberation” beyond its otherwise natural span.
Ironically you could say that the Nazi book publisher in Ireland managed successfully to carry on the physical fighting of WW2 against Britain long after the Wermacht had surrendered albeit by poisoning childrens minds.

The lies propogated about the Potato famine were responsible for a great many innocent deaths,many of them Irish.
I hate to see people casually perpetuating this rather nasty untruth.

22

The Irish famine was caused by a disease not by the Irish or the British. It was essentially unforeseeable by the science of the 1840s.

Irish farmers grew potatos because the majority of Irish farmland was under British ownership and was used for cash crops. Potatos were the only crop that could be grown on the land that was left for domestic food production and feed the population of Ireland. Crops like wheat or corn needed more land and better land than was available.

But while the outbreak of the potato blight was unforeseeable, once it occurred its effects could have been dealt with. In the 1780s, the British stopped all food exports from Ireland during an outbreak. The Irish were able to find food other than potatos and survived. But in the 1840s, British landowners ignored the conditions in Ireland and kept shipping food out of Ireland throughout the famine.

You are correct that there were relief attempts made by the British government. But while they were large programs by the standards of the time, they were completely inadequate to the size of the problem.

23

Just like the emperors used to buy up rice and wheat during fat years and store them up to be distributed in lean years. A system called the “balanced standard,” which worked well enough for centuries.