How Famines Work

push going on. It's this cool program called tripod t r y pod as in try a pod, right, get it? Yeah? And the whole basis of this is that we podcasters are asking you podcast listeners to go tell a friend to go try podcast not necessarily ours. I mean, if you want to recommend stuff, you should know, we're always fine with that. But even if it's some other one that um that you like or love even more, just

turned a friend onto podcasting is basically the whole point. Yeah, I mean you're probably gonna hear this on a lot of podcasts. And the the whole deal is, even though podcasting has come a long way since we've started, it's still sort of a baby of a medium. Yeah, half of a half of a percent is what we always say in the podcasting industry. But a lot of people still don't even know what podcasts are. So, uh, get out there, tell a family member, tell a friend what

podcasts are. Recommend when you like, tell them how to get it. Uh, you know, just go out in your backyard and put your ear to the sky until you hear a podcast. Yeah, that's a big one too, because a lot of people are like, Okay, sure I've heard a podcast, I have no idea where to start. Yeah, so recommend a good way to listen, maybe how you listen. And we really appreciate it, Like the whole industry appreciates

you spreading the word. That's how we grow and that's how we've grown on behalf of the entire podcasting industry. Thank you. Welcome to Stuff you should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast on Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry did jeer stir that should we say what just happened here?

Or focus like, oh, what is this? Probably twenty something thirty something episodes, Let's get up there and for the first time ever, right before we went go, Jerry said, focus, what does that mean? Usually she goes, huh what I don't get It is just me so bothering you guys, right, exactly, the smell that's so Jerry. Focus Alright. I feel pressure now, yeah I do. I'm a little off now, Jerry. So yeah,

that worked. All right, let's concentrate. All right. So we're talking Chuck about use your eye okay, yeah, I got something large in it. We're talking about famine today, yes, which goes with our super sad uh horrific geo political catastrophe sweets. Yeah, this probably will not be chock full of humor. No, I try to think of a way to insert some jokes. There's not unless we go on

a tangent. Do you remember the eighties stand up comedians, like they would make just the worst jokes that just would not fly, Like they get chased off stage by people with like like just the jokes they would make aids jokes and and famine jokes. Yea, yeah, he's just like the material they would make jokes about, and they like they weren't even remotely funny, you know, it was not not nuance or smarts or anything. Yeah, I think as Sam Kennison made like starving Ethiopian kid jokes, give

him a sandwich, cameraman, wouldn't him? Was that him? I think so, like just people can't do that today. It's a different world. So yeah, there probably won't be any jokes in this one. Uh, what there will be is tons of information and hopefully everybody who will understand famines after this can come together and prevent them for the rest of eternity, unless climate change gets that says we'll see at the end. Yes, I just spoiled it though,

didn't I. I'm glad you said that was relevant. Yeah, so everybody has a pretty good idea of what famine is. It's when you run out of food and a bunch of people start dying. That's actually pretty close to the real definition. But there's this guy who's a scholar of famine. His name is Cormac o Grata and he um has written several books on famines and studied famines and he's

a pretty sharp tack. So people kind of looked at him to say, what's the actual definition of a famine and he says in his best Irish accent, Uh, it's a lot like malnutrition. But it's a lot worse. There's a lot more crisis, there's a lot more death. YEA. Specifically, he says, it's a shortage of food or purchasing power that leads directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger

induced diseases. And um, that's an important addition because it's not just hunger starvation related, but all the disease that comes along with that that can kill people very much more easily because you're so under nourished. Right, And we'll find out too, it's a It forms a bit of a vicious cycle because people start to get hungry and

start to starve and start to suffer from disease. They have an even harder time, say, working in field produce crops, and so the whole thing just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. Once it passes um breaking point, it really starts to spiral out of control. Yeah, it's a it's a three pronged terror of poverty, hunger, and disease, all contributing to one another. Right. So, Cormeco grads definition of a famine is a daily death rate um of

above one per ten thousand people. Is that ten thousand? Yeah, alright, I had a period and not a comma. That's uh, that's European and I didn't, is it. It's gotta be because that didn't. That's like point zero zero zero one percent of the population per day, is that right? Yeah?

I think that is ten thousand, because just off the top of my head, like the normal American death rate is like eight hundred and twenty three per one hundred thousand people, So that is significantly more daily death rate. That's the first characteristic. Yeah. Number two is the proportion of wasted children is above and wasted means there there muscle masses withering away due to starvation. Yeah. Technically it means they weigh too standard deviations or more below average.

And just that term itself is like the most heartbreaking thing you can wasted children. Yeah, in any sense, that's not a good thing, because especially when it has to do with famine. Uh. And then finally, the prevalence of what's called quash or core, which is um it's basically

an extreme malnutrition due to protein deficiency. Yeah, and those pictures everybody who grew up in the eighties and saw the pictures of the starving children in Africa that were just little skin and bone kids, but they had these huge bloated pot bellies. That's a classic hallmark of quash core. Yeah, very sad. Yeah uh. And then he went on to qualify further with severe famine that means a daily death rate above five out of ten thousand, uh, proportion of

wasted children above and then that same quash or core prevalence. Right, So if quash your core is around, you got a famine on your hands. That's not a normal thing that happens in a normal food secure population. Yeah. And that's that's the main distinguishing factor between famine and just what you would consider malnutrition. And this is all tied into what we call food security, right, and we we we talked about food security before, I think maybe in desertification

or something like that. Yeah, I know we have at some point, but we talked a lot about the food the green Revolution to which factors in but um, food security is that means you have you have food available, you can get to that food or that food can get to you readily, and you can use that food to meet your health needs. You can leverage it to make your population healthy. Yeah, Like if it's if your entire countries food supply is twinkies. You do not have

food security. There's an abundance of it. People can get to it very easily. It's probably affordable for everybody, but it's not nutritious. Or if your country has nothing but like the finest fruits and vegetables and proteins, but only the very wealthy have access to it because it's too expensive, well,

you don't have food security. So, according to the u N, if you have food security in a nation, all people at all times have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and get

this food preferences for an active and healthy life. Yeah, which I mean we'll talk about Ethiopia some later, but at one point the goal was, which they you know, never met, was that not only would they have food one day readily available, but be able to choose what they wanted to eat. Like there's something you don't think about. You really take that for granted here in the United States and elsewhere. Um, it's not just having food, but like,

oh I might like to eat this or that. You know, uh, all right, so a lot of things can affect this food security. UM. And We're gonna talk about all these as throughout the show as they relate to famine. But obviously you think of natural disasters first, and probably drought first. Yeah, that's a that's a big one. If you don't have water and rain, you can't grow crops, usually uh, crop blight, which we'll talk a little bit about the potato famine

in Ireland later on. Um, but any kind of disease pest, even like over abundance of weeds, could conceivably ruin a crop flooding, extraordinarily cold weather, extraordinarily hot weather, we'll just say weather patterns in general, Yes, severe weather. And then a big one which a lot of people, a lot of people I think, mainly think of natural disasters or natural factors, and political conflict is one of the big, big,

big contributors. So here's this is what we're coming to though eventually, is there's a big debate on what causes famine.

And for many, many years everyone said, well, don't be dump, droughts caused famine, right, But studies, much more recent studies have found that actually, if you kind of peek behind the curtain a little bit, yeah, there was a drought and it started the famine, But what actually caused the famine or caused it to be horrible is usually government, either government that has bungled something or um just is it moved to actually care to do anything to alleviate

the famine. As we'll see. Yeah, what I gathered from reading this was most famine throughout all of history has been caused by natural factors, but modern famine, like from the nineteenth century on, has largely been that plus government factors. Does that sound about right? I think the very presence of famine in the globalized era is just because of

governments screwing things up. Yes, because there is enough food defeat everyone at this point, right, and enough of a trade supply lines and government aid agency NGOs who are working to get that food to those people, and prices that a lot of times there's people standing in their way. Yes. Another big It can be sort of a domino effect too.

So when you have food security in one place start to crumble or wayne, uh, then you have another country nearby, maybe it may start stockpiling for themselves, uh, fewer exports and protecting their own population, and then that drives up process prices for people that were depending on importing that food and it just starts this big vicious cycle, right exactly. Um, back in two eight there were food riots in Bangladesh and Haiti and Egypt. Do you remember that because of rice? Right?

It was because of rice. But the global food price head like when they look at food prices, they look at baskets of foods around the world, UM, put them together and say this is how much food costs these days. It rose between two thousand two and two thousand eight. Food prices rose a hundred globally, and a lot of

people got priced out of the market. And when they looked at what happened, apparently that price increase was due to using food for biofuels, like using crops that normally would have gone to food, we're being used to create energy like biofuels, right, And so that drove grain prices up through the roof because speculators got involved and food was being diverted from the food supply into the energy supply, and then crop land was being increasingly diverted to produce

the stuff for the energy supply as well. And it had a huge effect that just drove food prices up around the world. One of the big problems that can contribute to famines. As we'll see in a lot of famines, there are people still producing food for export because they can't afford it. But their country starving to death. But they can't afford it because they don't have the money. So ts but the rest of us, you have the money, so keep growing that food. Yeah, it's pretty devastating effect. Uh.

And it's obviously most devastating for um. And you always hear about this, the two groups, the elderly and the young. UM. I don't know about the total number of children, but the stat that I have from the u N, the most recent STATA have, is that twenty one thousand children die of hunger every day day yep, every four seconds. Oh it's awful. Yeah, it's sobering to say the least. So uh, you know what happens is, especially if you're

young or you're old. Uh, that disease sets in and little kids and old people can't fight it like um, you know the parents can. And then you know the parents are in bad shape too. Well, it's not like

anyone's doing great. When you're malnourished, your immune system starts to dig cline and when your immune system starts to decline, that's the disease comes in, especially if um, a group starts to migrate in search of food, because then you could be living in um unsanitary conditions and everybody has lower immune systems and you're basically in a herd. Now moving like moving to a different place to get food, and so a disease can just rip through a population.

Well yeah, and and uh that's article points out that refugees are not often resettled in, you know, the most hospitable areas either, so uh, moving doesn't necessarily help the cause in a lot of cases. Um, all right, let's take a break and we're gonna come back and talk a little bit about some of the more noteworthy famines throughout history. All right, So I said, we're gonna talk about historical famines. I lied, that's coming later. Is that

all right? Yeah? That's fine, all right, So we're gonna talk. He sent this great article, Um, what was the name of it? The History of Humanity is a history of hunger. It was written by a guy named Mark Joseph Stern on Slate. This is a good one. Yeah. Yeah, he's basically ringing the bell. He's saying Hey guys, Uh, there seems to be this movement towards looking at famines as

the result of dictatorships, which we'll get into super interesting. Um, but let's not forget something else, and it's a little something called global climate change, because I think from Stearns perspective, and he doesn't put this explicitly, but he basically says, yes, dictatorships can have this effect and have had this effect. That's proven. But really, honestly, that's fairly localized from a

globalized perspective. Right, even if it just happens in China, that's still technically local as far as the globe is concerned. And that means that there's other people around the globe that can help the people in China or Ethiopia or Ireland or wherever a famine happens. Again, so we've got stuff in place, but if the entire global food supply starts to become threatened by climate change, then we're all toast.

I think is ultimately the message of what he's saying. Yeah, and he he was kind of saying like he kind of set up really well throughout history and then said, but nowadays, you know, things have never been better there's more food than ever. Supply chain is more robust, so like we shouldn't have anything to worry about, right, like

on a global scale. And that's when he said, you know, you might want to look at some of these studies and uh, one of them, there was a report from the U N inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change and they said that rising temperatures around the globe are cutting into global food supply. Um. I think to the point now where if it continues at current levels, there could be a two cut in crop harvests each decade moving forward.

And it might not sound like a lot two percent a decade though, but when you couple that with a rising population, that's a problem. Um. Especially like in the short term, you might think, oh, well, you can grow more food more places if if it's warmer, if things are melting, Yeah, and certainly more CEO two will increase yields in the short term, but um, in the long term, warming trends will make crops wilt, especially near the tropics.

I saw one step that said a three percent I'm sorry, a three degree celsius increase in temperature at the tropics could uh cut on crops. So it's you know, it's a real threat. Yeah. Well, even without a massive temperature change like that, are an increase in CEO to One of the trademarks of UM climate change is severe weather, which we're seeing more and more. It seems too much rain.

Severe weather is not enough. Yeah yeah, or either one over like a couple of year period you're not going to be able to grow crops, or you're growing season is going to be shortened, or the whole crop will just be wiped out right there at the end, who knows well. And then the other thing you need to think about, which he points out, is what we can invent our way out of this, like technology will take

care of it always. And the study from NASA there's a more dire wind from NASA than even the U n one UM that basically says we're screwed UM And the NASA one says technological change tends to raise both per capital resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, basically meaning it's just it's sort of a net net, like we can't invent our way out of it, Like it's net net up to the point where we run out of resources and then we're toasts. So there is

a big threat from climate change. But what Stern's saying is actually kind of retro to tell you the truth, because up until the last couple of decades, everybody looked at famine as strictly a a natural disaster, and it it started to become increasingly apparent of what kind of a man made disaster famine can be, especially when people started to look at China's Great Famine back as part of Mao's cultural revolution. So Chuck China I didn't really realize this. I don't think I didn't know a lot

about it either. There is there's a something called when Mao took over, when the Communists took over China UM. One of the things that Mao set his sights on Chairman Mao Mousley doing was that he wanted to show the West just how great communism was, the same dream

of Stalin Um. But he also wanted to be the top guy in the communist world too, so he was very ambitious and one of the ways to do that was one of the same path that Stalin had followed, which was what We've got a lot of agriculture here, Let's use our agriculture to fund and finance industrialization. We're gonna shock the system. We're gonna take these old agrarian backwards ways, we're gonna put him together in this great communist way, and we're gonna squeeze as much productivity out

of them as we can. We're gonna funnel that money into the workers in the cities. We're gonna make China the glorious leader of the world, and we're gonna catch up to productivity, uh, to the productivity of the UK or the US within ten years, five years, which is insane. It's called the Great Leap Forward. Uh. And it was a five year plan, which you're right it was. It was I mean to call it ambitious, it was. What

it was was a disaster in the making. Because what happened was, especially when you live under someone like mouse Tongue, you're gonna have people that are afraid to tell the truth about what's going on. So what happened from the very beginning is officials, either driven by fear or just because they were so caught up in the movement, started um exaggerating reports of crop success, like they were literally reporting like three to five times what they were really

bringing in with their crops. Uh. And then the authorities came along and basically took those crops to the urban centers, killed off anyone who had any opposition to this. Well, I think they will also kill off locally to like if we were gonna say no, this guy's lying about crop yields, but the local people would would take care

of you. Yeah, you just disappear. Uh. And so what happened in this is an actual quote, um mouse tongue said, to distribute resources evenly will only ruin the great leap forward. When there's not enough to eat, people starved to death. It is better to let half the people die so that the others can eat their fill. So there you have it, right. It was very clearly a man made famine, like they were aware of it, um. And you you wonder,

like why were they coming to grab the grain? Well, grain had turned from something that people produced locally for basically local consumption, into a national commodity that was used to feed these workers and then to sell on the global market to finance the glorious revolution. Right, So when grain was turned into a commodity and people were given quotas to meet, if you wanted to get ahead, you could just say, oh, we had this great great yield

this this year, so we've got all this green. And there were cases where the Chinese government would come and requisition more grain than the the than they had then they'd even grown that based on these false reports. Right, So people started to starve. Clearly, Mao had no problem with it because it was the people out in the and it was the farmers, not the workers, who were starving. And in three years, the lowest number anyone's willing to say of the total number of people who died in

three years from this famine is fifteen million people. Yeah, that's the lowest. That's what the Chinese government itself officially says. Yeah, I've seen numbers. I've seen a total population loss and that means thirty five million deaths and forty million people that weren't born because of all this, So total population loss of seventy five million um. And it's still apparently, like I looked into it today, it's very taboo to even talk about it today in China, and they don't

they don't even call it a famine. They call it, uh, three years of natural disaster or three years of difficulties. That's what they call capitalized. Yeah, yeah, like that's the titial name. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, and apparently the um Yeah, they don't talk about it. It's it's not obviously not taught in schools and certainly not taught as the result of a calamitous um government policy because that same government,

the Communist Party, is still in charge there. But yeah, that was a huge, enormous famine, and I guess scholarship on that sorted to open people's eyes about how human intervention could make a famine much much worse. Same thing with Ethiopia as well. Um. Ethiopia is almost famous in a weird way for for famines. Yeah, they were, especially like you said, if you grew up in the eighties, it was sort of the face of famine and drought. It was Ethiopia. Um. And if you go back, you know,

back in time Prime Minister uh melists Zenawi. Um. This was what more than twenty years ago at this point that when I mentioned earlier what his vision for the country, he said, you know, I hope in ten years that Ethiopians will eat three times a day. And after twenty years, not only were gonna have enough food, but they're gonna have the luxury of choosing what they eat. Uh. He was in office for twenty one years before he died in power and Uh, things these days aren't a whole

lot better. No, So Um, Like I remember learning about Ethiopia and their famines, and I just was thinking, like, Wow, they must have just the worst weather. They've got the worst luck with weather. Turns out no, they had the worst luck with governments. Um. So they had a famine in nineteen seventy three that the government basically just covered up. Yeah, the Wallow Famine. Yeah. And in that three hundred thousand people died. Uh. And even though there were there was

actually plenty of food. The reason the family had come along was because food prices had increased just a little bit, but the people in the Wallow region were so poor they couldn't afford the food that was even available to them. Yeah. And this is nineteen seventy three, the same year that Emperor Highley Selassie spent thirty five million dollars on his eightieth birthday celebration. So he's starting it's starting to kind of become clear what's going on. And then the very

famous famine famous here in the West, the eighty five famine. Um, everyone who was funding that. That was when band Aid came out. They had that do they know It's Christmas song? Um? They had the Live Aid concerts. Phil Collins flew in the Concorde from London to the Philadelphia to play two shows at the same night. Do you remember Live Aid? How old are you? I was eight? Do you remember it happening? Like? Did you watch it? I remember the Phil Collins thing, of course you do, because he loved

Phil Collins. Now I totally remember. I was babysitting at a summer gig, a regular summer gig where I would baby sitting these kids like for half days, like you know, money through Friday. And I was babysitting these kids and we watched Live Aid and I remember seeing, of course Phil Collins, and I remember seeing the amazing performance by Queen Like it's still like one of their like hallmark

performances was their Live Aid. Um. But yeah, it was like it was all over the place USA for Africa that was one of the big causes because of this famine, right, and it was great, like there was all these great pictures of not great pictures, but they were pictures spread far and wide. They were waking up the west, Like, guys, there's a huge problem. You gotta give. And band Aid and live Aid raised a hundred and fifty million dollars in nine four for famine relief in in Ethiopia. They

had a significant impact. But what no one realized because the reporters were too lazy to report and the government was doing a good job covering up. This famine was not the direct result of a drought or a crop failure. The government was actually fighting a civil war secretly against the Um what the group that now makes up Aera Trea,

the err trean Um ethnic group. Uh. And the government was like napalming the crop lands there, blowing up cargo transports, um, blowing up farmers markets to affect the food supply and to create a famine. It was a man made famine. Yeah, and not only that, you know, I talked about frivolous spending by the government. They spent that year and uh, I think three they spent between a hundred million and two hundred million dollars to celebrate the tenth anniversary of

the revolution, almost up to two d million dollars. So here's here's the thing. I'm reading this article from Spin I think it was written in called The Terrible Truth about band Aid. And so at the time, there are a lot of aid groups working in Ethiopia, and if you said anything about how the government was taking this um like aid money and using it for themselves and not distributing it correctly. They were trying to put tariffs and taxes on age shipments into the country just to

make money off of it. If you said anything, your your group would get kicked out. And apparently Medicine Songs, Frontier Doctors Without Borders UM had raised the alarms and they got kicked out of Ethiopia. And they went to Bob Geldof and said, hey, um, we know you have a hundred and fifty million dollars that you're about to give to Ethiopia. Let us tell you what's really going on there and then you just wait until there's a stable government to give it to. And he was like, no,

it's fine, it'll be fine. I'd rather I'd rather work with these devils and help these people out a little bit then than just not right. And a lot of people say that he um he was extremely reckless and basically he gave a hundred and fifty million dollars to an autocratic government that was creating a famine in its own country. Is that a new article? It was from? All right, I need to check that out. Yeah, it's called the Terrible Truth about Live about band Aid, About

band Aid. Uh. Well, there's a great book in the same article that's reference that you sent. UM. A Nobel Prize winning economist name Marcia Sin wrote a book called Development is Freedom and basically kind of backs up what we're talking about. Uh. Sin says that, you know, authority, authoritarian systems are the were the ones who have famines. Uh. And they went back and did a historical investigation and these are twenty century famines, thirty major famines that happened.

We're all in countries led by autocratic rule or that we're under armed conflict at the time. Yeah, and the the um this article from I don't I wish I knew who wrote it. I feel terrible, but it was in huff Po, So there you go. Um. The author said, there's a country right next to Ethiopia that that has a lot of the same weather, a lot of the same soil conditions, growing conditions, crop plant Botswana. They said,

Botswana is a democracy and it has been. Yeah, it has been since the sixties, and since it's been a democracy, it's never had a famine. And it's right next door to Ethiopia. Well yeah, and the whole idea there is that if resources were not being allocated properly, the people would have a voice and change the people in power. But when you're under autocratic rule, you're either completely squashed

or so disregarded that they don't care if you are dying. Basically, they are in power so and they can't do anything to change it. They don't need your vote or your support because they've got a barrel of a gun at you. That's how they stay in power. Yeah. A group called Human Rights Watch, which is great. I know we've talked

about them before. Uh. In two thousand ten, they did a work called Development Without Freedom How AID underwrites repression Ethiopia, and it just completely confirms all of this that it's just it's suppression of a people and watching them die and not caring and it's still going on. So let's take another break and then we'll talk about Ireland and

then we'll talk about how to combat famines. So, chuck Um, I think when most people think of famine they think, if not of Ethiopia and of Ireland, because Ireland had one heck of a famous famine back in the nineteenth century that actually created Ireland and the Irish as we know him today. Yeah, the Irish potato famine. Um are cohorts are colleagues Tracy and Hollyott. Stuff you miss in history class. They do one on it. Yeah, did a great episode just on this. I recommend listening to that.

But um, here's our knuckle headed overview. Uh. This was also called the Great Irish Famine and their famine of eighteen forty five to forty nine because that's when it happened. Um. This was one of the ones that initially was caused by UH disease, it's called late blight, and it basically destroyed kind of every part of the potato. Yeah, the leaves, the roots, which I mean, if you're eating a potato, the root is what you're after. Um. They had I guess a cold, rainy spring. Yeah, it's kind of a

per picked storm of bad luck. Right, and this this microbe showed up from North America accidentally from what we understand, and so there were three successive years of dead crops. And one of the reasons why this had such an impact is that by this time, by the middle of the nineteenth century in Ireland, there are a lot of

um Irish farmers who were basically subsistence farmers. A lot of farmers in Ireland were small small land farmers who are tenant farmers, which means they they work the land and they had to give up a substantial amount of their crop yield in this case to Great Britain, which held Ireland under colonial rule at the time, and then they could keep a little bit for themselves to keep their family alive, so they could come out and work the fields for another day. Right, most of those people

depended almost exclusively on potatoes. Yeah, not only for income, but like what they ate on a daily basis exactly so for their nutrition. And not only that, but they they had whittled it down to just a couple of varieties of potato. It's like, yeah, it's like that's bad news if uh, disease strikes or or blight or something like that. If you've got just a couple of varieties and your dependent on that as a nation, and they're both susceptible to that blight yeah, then you're you're screwed.

And that's exactly what happened. Um it said in the early eighteen forties, almost half the Irish population depended almost exclusively on the potato for diet, and especially the rural poor farmers and um in five that uh, that's strain. It was called fidoh uh phido thora. I think so, I think there's got to be some silent letters in there.

There's a there's a lot of consonants strung together and um like you said that came from North America and everything just rotted and uh, this was the natural part of it. So then you have England, the controlling body, um like needs to step in and do something, and they kind of did, but not a chin up. Keep that grain coming our way. Yeah, that was a primister named Sir Robert Peel, and he he provided a little bit of relief. He authorized the import of corn from

the United States. Helped avoid a little bit of starvation. But it was certainly not a problem solver. No, and again they really did say, uh, we're sorry to having these troubles. We'll see what we can do, but keep those grain imports coming. Because just like in the wallow Uh famine in Ethiopia. There were plenty of places in Ireland where the there was grain in abundance, but the

people growing the green couldn't afford it. And so because the people elsewhere we're having problems with the potato crop, the price of food was going through the roof because there was less food overall, and the people back in great break and still typically had money to pay for this food. So they were exporting the stuff out of Ireland during a famine for their own consumption, including livestock which must be fed that grain. So to add insul

to injury. They were saying, you guys are starving over there. Keep exploring that grain, but feed some of it to your livestock, and then export the livestock to us to eat. Yeah, and not only that, it was just so compounded. It's just like so frustrating to look at, like through a modern lens of like things that they could have done differently. But um, these poor farmers like you said that they were farming a lot of time on farms owned by

British absentee landowners. They couldn't farm all of a sudden, so they weren't getting paid. So then they in turn couldn't pay rent back to the landowners, and so they were basically evicted. Hundreds of thousands of tenant farmers were evicted under these years. And uh there was an eighteen thirty four there was something called the British Poor Law and acted in Ireland that said able bodied indigence were sent to a workhouse rather than given relief. So now

you're sent to a workhouse. You're not even like farming the land that you lived on to provide for your family, right, which is a terrible, terrible move in any famine. Part of the spiral that spiral out of control of famine is something called livelihood shock, when farmers who can still conceivably grow um food get priced out of their own crop land and they can't afford to work any longer. Your your food supply is taking a further hit, which

you should not allow to happen. But the British government definitely did allow it to happen. Um the guy who came after John Peel or Robert Peel, not John Peel. Um the guy who came after Robert Peel, Lord John Russell. He did even less than Um Peel did. Basically kicked it back to Ireland to deal with. But still give us your your export that grain to us and we'll just leave it to the free markets. If you ever leave dealing with the famine to the markets to hammer out,

you have abdicated all responsibility for dealing with that famine. Yeah, that's not okay. The markets aren't equipped to deal with the famine, right. The famine happens when the markets break down, right, and you need assistance to correct that. It doesn't just work itself out. Uh. So you know, Ireland already is not so happy to be under the thumb of uh the British. Um. This got even worse when there was this sort of attitude among sort of the elite of

of England that, um, you know what this is. This is really just a sort of a correction because you know, those Irish all they do is have children, and there are far too many of them anyway, These poor Irish people have ten kids. So this is sort of a necessary correction, um in the long run. Apparently at the time that was a bit of the mentality of the

intellectuals of England. Yeah, so that's not going to do yourself any favors as far as getting along and one of the other things that happened was a consolidation of wealth. Like all of those small farms that were that people were getting kicked off of because they couldn't pay their rent.

The their landlords couldn't afford the farms any longer either because they weren't able to collect rent, And so wealthier landowners said, I'll buy your farm and your farm and your farm and your farm, and you're farming here, go buy some corn. You can get it from the soup kitchen over here. And then they put it together. So these small farms that farming these communities now we're single

large farms owned by single wealthy landowners. As a result, it's kind of like that's saying, if there's blood in the streets by real estate, that's what those guys were doing. Not cool. So in the end, this had a huge effect on the I mean, the way you put in this article the Dimmock graphic history of Ireland um directly

caused from the famine. Their population of about eight point four million in eighteen eight sorry eighteen forty four fell to six point six million, uh just seven years later, and about a million people died literally just died from starvation, and by the time Ireland achieved independence in nineteen one. In twenty one, the population was barely half of what it was in the early eighteen forties. Yeah, because that's not supposed to happen. Death and emigration, Yeah, how many

like people? Uh? Another two I think a million died in another two million immigrated as a result. New York City, baby, Yeah, that's how New York got to be in New York. So we've got, um, we've got a pretty good idea of what famines are, how they happen. There is still that struggle between how much of it is man made how much of it is natural. I think it's a combination of the two at this time. Sure, but how

do you prevent something like a famine? Chuck Well, Um, there's a lot of controversy and um, there's a lot of controversy surrounding it. A lot of people rightfully are saying that even AID groups like what we're doing is putting a band aid on something, and they're not like getting to the root of some of these problems. And

aid is great, you know, it's keeping people alive. They're not saying don't do that, but it's not addressing the real problems, right, and apparently the real problems are autocratic rule. Well want one of them for sure. Yeah. Another one is you know, just food education. Um, there are food for work programs which apparently are working out pretty good.

So they'll have you know, I think they will deliver some food aid to get people able bodied enough to work, and then um, try and get people working on infrastructure jobs in the country. UM, and exchange for food. Yeah, in exchange for food, and I would imagine money. I don't know for sure, but I don't think it's straight up food. I wonder if like, yeah, I wonder maybe it seems like could be a combination the two or maybe not. I don't know. Another one is hashing out

early warning signs. Probably they have different UM scales now of food security to kind of gauge where a country is as far as it's spiral towards famine, like don't wait till you're seeing the unit SEF commercial before you act. But not only that, you government of this, this the people that are about to enter into a famine. You need to do certain things like there's a famine that UM is. I believe Ethiopia is on the verge of

another one again right now. And part of the problem is the government denied that this was that this was happening, that there was going to be a famine. They said, we have food security and they said the author of that huff Po article pointed out, no, there's plenty of food, but it's too expensive in a lot of places, so that's not food security. And they didn't do enough, Like they didn't tell um cattle herders to move their their um herds closer to like reliable water sources. They didn't.

There's steps and actions that governments that care about their people, or care at least about the food supply um can take. And there are early warning signs and apparently they are born out of famine codes from nineteenth century India. India had a string of famines in the nineteenth century that killed like seventeen million people, so they really started to pay attention to what made up the warning signs or

fam of famine. Well, there's something it was created in nineteen eighty five and it may have been based on what you're talking about, called the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, and they monitor these trends and food prices, UH, food security and basically you can compare it to other years, other areas and right now because I want to see like kind of what the current state of the world was, there is a global alert UM emergency food assistant needs

ON needs are unprecedented. And these four areas right now, Nigeria, Yemen, South Sudan and Somalia are the most of the areas of the highest concern and has the reasons of concern right here Nigeria the Boco Harem conflict. So there you have it right, Yeah, it doesn't have to be a dictatorship being lazy. You can be in the middle of a war torn country and people aren't growing crops like they normally do when a wars not on. So there's one.

In Yemen, extensive conflict has reduced incomes and food prices remain elevated. Uh South Sudan conflict severely disrupted trade, humanitarian access in livelihoods. And finally Somalia. Somalia was the only one of the four that seemed like it was weather related and it said that UM the December on aus pronounced the y r season. There two rainy seasons, the goose season and the day are or dear der season,

and apparently they've both been below average. So it looks like in Somalia it's due to rainfall, but elsewhere it's you know, conflict, conflict, conflict. So if you care, if you want to help, if you want to make a difference, look around, do your research, find an aid group that you feel good about, and uh, give money, give time, do something. Don't just sit back and eat your big

mac and forget about the whole thing. I agreed. If you want to know more about famine, you can type that word into the search part how stuff works dot com. Since I said search parts time for a listener mail. I think this one Trump's homelessness. Surely we won't get an email saying that people deserve children, does deserve to die every four seconds? I don't know if we do, we'll get they'll all start with I believe in a vengeful God. Alright, I'm gonna call this one. Uh. Whatever

happened to super fan Sarah? Remember that? Remember Sarah Sparrow, the amazing twelve year old fan? Right? Yeah, so I listened to several podcasts per day, guys, Uh, to learn something and to drown out the buzz of the office. I work in I was going through so many that I had caught up to the President forcing me to dig way back to the archive instead of waiting for the newest one. So he's sandwiching, right, That's fine, it's

the way to do it. At the end of the podcast in two thousand and ten about grandfather's diets shortening our lives, um fascinating. By the way, this is June two ten. You've got the email from Sarah who had been listening to the show, uh since she was eleven. At the time she was thirteen. You mentioned you should go to a high school graduation and be the keynote speaker. You were still doing this. Well, my math is right then. Uh, Sarah is twenty years old and halfway through college. So

I hope you guys don't feel too old. But I think is an exceptional accomplishment. You're still doing the show. You're more popular than ever. Keep up the good work, Josh Taylor and Josh you know he asked about Sarah. Sadly we haven't heard from Sarah in years. Were like the giving tree, we got ditched, she ditched us and um or she just you know, still listens and doesn't right in it's playing it cool. Maybe so well she is.

You know, it's twenty years old. It's not super cool to still be the Sarah the amazing seven year old for eleven year old band. You're smelly old pseudo uncles. But Sarah, if you were out there, hit us up, yeah, say hi, send us an email. We would love, love, love to hear from you. Yeah, well even guaranteed read it on the on the air, and you know what that goes for you too, Sam who is in college Summer of Sam Sam. So all of our younger listeners, like,

they girl up and they forget about us. It's so sad, but then they turned like and they'll come back. They'll be back. Well, if you want to get in touch of this for a while, make us feel pretty good and then forget about us, you can start by tweeting to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined uswitter home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot com

For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com