Good morning everybody. It's Saturday here in the world. I'm Chuck. I'm your co host of Stuff you Should Know, and it is my charge, my duty to pick out this week's Saturday Select selection. I'm going with hal Famines work from February thirteenth, twenty seventeen. Pretty interesting stuff and also a little bit sad. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W Chuck Bryant and Jerry the jerister that should we say? What just happened? It's weird, of course, said focus?
Yeah, like, oh what is this? Nine hundred and 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 this me so bothering?
You guys? Right? Exactly?
Smell me so bothering?
That's so Jerry?
Focus?
All right?
I feel pressure now, Yeah I do.
I'm a little off now Jerry, thanks?
So yeah, that worked, all right.
Let's concentrate, all right, So we're talking Chuck about you is your eye.
Okay, yeah, I got something large in it.
We're talking about famine today, yes, which goes with our super sad, horrific geopolitical 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 though eighties stand up comedians like they would make just the worst jokes that just would not fly, Like they get chased off stage by what are you people with? Like, like just the jokes they would make AIDS jokes and famine jokes. Oh yeah yeah, as far as just like the material they would make jokes about and the like they weren't even remotely funny, you know. Yeah, it was not nuanced or smarts or anything.
Yeah. I think Sam Kennison made like starving Ethiopian kid jokes, right, I give him a sandwich camera man. Wasn't that him?
Was that him?
I think? So, like just people can't do that today.
It's a different world. Yeah, So yeah, there probably won't be any jokes in this one. Yeah. 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 it, says we'll see at the end. Yes, I just spoiled it though, didn't I.
Yeah, that's I'm glad you said that that was relevant.
Yeah.
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 great real definition. But there's this guy who's a scholar of famine. His name is Cormac Gograda, and he has written several books on famines and studied famines, and he's a pretty sharp tack. So people kind of look to him to say, what's the actual definition of a famine and he says, in his best Irish accent, it's a
lot like malnutrition, Yeah, but it's a lot worse. There's a lot more crisis, there's a lot more death.
Yeah. 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 that's an important addition because it's not just hunger starvation related but all the disease it comes along with that that can kill people very much more easily because you are so undernourished.
Right, And we'll find out too. It forms a bit of a vicious cycle. Like as 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 to produce crops, and so the whole thing just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. Once it passes 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, right, all contributing to one another.
Right. So Cormaco Grada's definition of a famine is a daily death rate of above one per ten thousand people.
Is that ten thousand?
Yeah?
All right, I had a period and not a comma.
That's a 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. Okay, because just off the top of my head, like that normal American death rate is like eight hundred and twenty three per one hundred thousand people, So that is significantly more.
All right, So that daily death rate, that's the first characteristic.
Yeah. Number two is the proportion of wasted children is above twenty percent, And wasted means their muscle mass is withering away due to starvation.
Yeah. Technically it means they weigh two standard deviations or more below average. And just that term itself is like the most heartbreaking thing you can make.
Wasted children. Yeah, in any sense, it's not a good thing good, especially when it has to do with famine.
And then finally, the prevalence of what's called quashercore, which is it's basically an extreme malnutrition due to protein deficiency.
Yeah, and those pictures everybody who grew up in the eighties, Yeah, and saw the pictures of the starving children in Africa. There were just little skin and bone kids, but they had these huge, bloated pot bellies. Yeah, that's a classic hallmark of quash core.
Yeah. Very sad. Yeah, and then he went on to qualify further with severe famine that means a daily death rate above five out of ten thousand, proportion of wasted children above forty percent, and then that same quasher core prevalence.
Right, So if quasher core's 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 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 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 food security is that means 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 UN, 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, right, Like this something you don't think about. You really take that for granted here in the United States and elsewhere. It's not just having food, but like, oh I might like to eat this or that,
right you know. All right, So a lot of things can affect this food security, and we're going to 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 big one.
It is a big one, undeniably.
If you don't have water and rain, you can't grow crops usually no.
Crop blight, which we'll talk a little bit about the potato famine in Ireland later on.
But any kind of disease pest, even like an over abundance of weeds, could conceivably ruin a crop flooding.
Extraordinarily cold weather, extraordinary 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 we'll see.
This is what we're coming to though, eventually, is there is a big debate on what causes famine. And for many, many years everyone said, well, don't be dumb, droughts cause 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, yeah, or caused it to be horrible is usually government, either government that has bungled something or just isn't 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. Yeah, does that sound about right?
Yeah. 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 agencies and goos who are working to get that food to those people in crises 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 wane, then you have another country nearby maybe that may start stockpiling for themselves fewer exports and protecting their own population, and then that drives up prices for people that were depending on importing that food, and it just starts this big vicious cycle.
Right exactly. Back in two thousand and 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 had Like when they look at food prices, they look at baskets of foods around the world. Put them together and say this is how much food costs these days. It rose between two thousand and two and two thousand and eight, food prices rose one hundred and forty percent globally, and a lot of people got priced out of the market.
And when they looked at what happened, apparently seventy five percent of that price increase was due to using food for biofuels, like using crops that normally would have gone to food were 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 this 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 is we'll see in a lot of famines there are people still producing food for export because they can't afford it, that are starving, but their country's starving to death, but they can't afford it because they don't have the money so ts, but the rest of us do have the money, so keep growing that food.
Yeah, it's pretty devastating effect. Yeah, and it's obviously most devastating for and you always hear about this the two groups, the elderly and the young. I don't know about the total number of children, but the stat that I have from the UN, the most recent stat I have, is that twenty one thousand children die of hunger every day day. Yep, geeze every four seconds.
Oh that's awful.
Yeah, it's sobering to say the least. So you know what happens is, especially if you're younger, you're old, that disease sets in and little kids and old people can't fight it like 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 decline. And when your immune system starts to decline, that's disease comes in. Especially if a group starts to migrate in search of food. Yeah, because then you could be living in unsanitary conditions and everybody has lower immune systems and you're basically in a herd. Now, like moving to a different place to get food, and a disease can just rip through a population.
Well yeah, and that article points out that refugees are not often resettled in, you know, the most hospitable areas either, so moving doesn't necessarily help the cause in a lot of cases. All right, let's take a break and we're going to come back and talk a little bit about some of the more noteworthy famines throughout history. All right, So I said we're going to talk about historical famines. I lied, that's coming later. Is that all right?
Yeah, that's fine.
All right, So we're going to talk You sent this great article. 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 belly's saying, hey, guys, there seems to be this movement toward looking at famines as the result of dictatorships, which we'll get into super interesting, but let's not forget something else. And it's a little something called global climate change. Yeah, because I think from Stearn's perspective, and he doesn't put this explicitly but he basically says, yes, dictatorships can have this effect and have
had this effect. It's proven. But really, honestly, that's fairly localized from a globalized perspective. Yeah, 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. Yeah, 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 was kind of saying like he kind of set it 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 on a global scale. And that's when he said, you know, you might want to look at some of these studies.
And one of them, there was a report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and they said that rising temperatures around the globe are cutting into global food supply. I think to the point now where if it continues at current levels, there could be a two percent cut in crop harvests each decade moving forward. Yeah, 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. 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. True in a lot of cases, Yeah, and certainly more CO two will increase yields in the short term, but in the long term, warming trends will make crops welt, especially near the tropics. I saw one stat that said a three percent I'm sorry, three degree celsius increase in temperature at the tropics could cut corn
crops by twenty percent. Wow, So it's you know, it's a real threat.
Yeah. Well, even without a massive temperature change like that or an increase in CO two, one of the trademarks of climate change is severe weather, which we're seeing more and more, it seems, Yeah, too much rain, severe weather is not enough rain good for crops. 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 well, 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 UN one that basically says we're screwed. And the NASA one says technological change tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, basically meaning it just is sort of a net net, like we can't invent our way out of.
It, right, Like it's net up till the point where we run out of resources. Yes, then we're toast. Yes, 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 decades, everybody he looked at famine as strictly a natural disaster, and 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's a something called when Mao took over. When the Communists took over China in nineteen forty nine, one of the things that Mao set his sights on, Sherman Mauzi Dong, was that he wanted to show the West just how great communism was, the same dream of Stalin, 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, well, we've got a lot of agriculture here. Let's use our agriculture to fund and finance industrialization. So we're gonna shock the system. We're gonna take these old agrarian backwards ways, we're gonna put them 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 going to catch up to productivity to the productivity of the UK or the US within ten years, five years, which is insane.
Yeah, it's called the Great Leap Forward, and it was a five year plan, which you're right it was. I mean to call it ambitious. What it was was a disaster in the making because what happened was, especially when you live under someone like Malse Tongue, you're going to 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 fear or just because they were so caught up in the movement, started exaggerating reports of crop success, like they were literally reporting like three to five times what they were really bringing in with their crops. 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 were also killed aff locally too, Like if you were going to say, no, this guy's lying about crop yields, Oh yeah, by the local people would take care of you.
Yeah, you just disappear. And so what happened in nineteen fifty eight, This is an actual quote. Malca 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 this is there, you have it, right.
It was very clearly a man made famine, like they were aware of it, and 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 year, so we've got all this grain. And there were cases where the Chinese government would come and requisition more grain than they had then they'd even grown that yea, 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 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. Oh yeah, so a total population loss of seventy five million. And it's still apparently, like I looked into it today, it is very taboo to even talk about it today in China. Right, And they don't call it a famine. They call it three years of natural disaster or three years of difficulties.
Right, that's what they call it, capitalized. Yeah, yeah, that's the title name.
Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing.
Yeah, and apparently the yeah, they don't talk about it. It's not obviously not taught in schools. It's certainly not taught as the result of a calamitous 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 Skulship on that started to open people's eyes about how human intervention could make a famine much much worse.
Same thing with Ethiopia as well. Ethiopia is almost famous in a weird way for famines.
Yeah, they especially, like you said, if you grew up in the eighties, it was sort of the face of famine and drought was Ethiopia. And if you go back, you know, back in time Prime Minister Melis Zenawi. 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 are going to have enough food, but they're
gonna have the luxury of choosing what they eat. He was in office for twenty one years before he died in power and things these days aren't a whole lot better.
No, So, 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. Yeah, it turns out no, they had the worst luck with governments. Yeah, 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. And even though there were there was actually plenty of food. The reason the famine 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 highly Selassie spent thirty five million dollars on his eightieth birthday celebration, Right, 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 nineteen eighty three to eighty five famine. Everyone who was funding that. That was when band Aid came out. They had that do they know It's Christmas song? They had the Live Aid concerts. Phil Collins flew in the concord from London to Philadelphia to play two shows at the same night.
Do you remember Live Aid? How old were you this eight four? Yeah?
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. No, I totally remember. I was babysitting at his summer gig, a regular summer gig where would babysit these kids like for half days, like you know, Monday 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, oh, it's still like one of their like hallmark performances. Was there Live Aid? But yeah, it was like it was all
over the place USA for Africa. It was one of the big causes because of this famine, right.
And it was great, like there was all these great pictures of or not great picture, but there were pictures spread far and wide that were waking up the West like, guys, there's a huge problem. You got to give. And band Aid and Live Aid raised one hundred and fifty million dollars in nineteen eighty four for famine relief, and in Ethiopia they had a significant impact. Yeah, 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 what the group that now makes up Eritrea, Yeah, the eritrean ethnic group. Uh. And the government was like naypalming the crop lands there, blowing up cargo transports, 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 in I think nineteen eighty three, they spent between one hundred million and two hundred million dollars to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the revolution, almost up to two hundred million dollars.
So here's the thing. I'm reading this article from spin I think it was written in nineteen eighty six, called the Terrible Truth about band Aid. And so at the time, there were a lot of aid groups working in Ethiopia, and if you said anything about how the government was taking this like aid money and using it for themselves and not distributing it correctly, they were trying to put tariffs and taxes on aid ship into the country just to make money off of it. If you said anything,
your group would get kicked out. And apparently Medicine Songs Frontier Doctors without Borders had raised the alarms and they got kicked out of Ethiopia. And they went to Bob Geldoff and said, hey, we know you have one hundred and fifty million dollars that you're about to give to Ethiopia. Yeah, let us tell you what's really going on there. Yeah, 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 work with these devils and help these people out a little bit than just not And a lot of people say that he he was extremely reckless and basically just gave one hundred and fifty million dollars to an autocratic government that was creating a famine in its own country.
Is that a new article.
No, it's from nineteen eighty six.
Oh wow, all right, I need to check that out.
Yeah, it's called The Terrible Truth about Live or about band Aid.
About band Aid. Yeah, well, there's a great book in this same article reference that you sent a Nobel Prize winning economist's name, Martya Senn wrote a book called Development is Freedom and basically kind of backs up what we're talking about. Sin says that, you know, authoritarian systems are the ones who have famines. And they went back and did a historical investigation and these are twenty century famines.
Thirty major famines that happened were all in countries led by autocratic rule or that were under armed conflict at the time.
Yeah. And this article from I wish I knew who wrote it. I feel terrible, but it was in HuffPo, So there you go. The author said, there's a country right next to Ethiopia that has a lot of the same weather, a lot of the same soil conditions, growing conditions, crop land. Botswana. They said, Botswana is a democracy, Yes, and it has been sixties. 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 and they can't do anything to change it.
Right, They don't need your vote or your support because they 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. In twenty ten, they did a report called Development Without Freedom How AID underwrites repression in Ethiopia, and it just completely confirms all of this. Yeah, that'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, I think when most people think of famine, they think, if not of Ethiopia, then 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 are cohorts our colleagues, Tracy and Hollyott. Stuff you miss in history class?
Do they do one on it? Yeah?
I did a great episode just on this. I recommend listening to that. But here's our knuckleheaded overview. This was also called the Great Irish Famine and their famine of eighteen forty five to forty nine, because that's when it happened. This was one of the ones that initially was caused by 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. Sure, they had a I guess a cold, rainy spring.
Yeah, it's kind of a perfect storm of bad luck.
Right, and this microbe showed up from North America accidentally, from what we understand. Yeah, 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 were a lot of Irish farmers who were basically subsistence farmers.
A lot of farmers in Ireland were small, small land farmers who were tenant farmers, which means 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. Yes, and 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. Yeah, 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 the problem with quem wa.
Yeah, it's like that's bad news if disease strikes or blight or something like that. If you've got just a couple of varieties and you're dependent on that as a nation.
And they're both susceptible to that blight.
Yeah, then you're screwed. Right, And that's exactly what happened. Yeah, it said in the early eighteen forties, almost half the Iris population depended almost exclusively on the potato for diet, and especially the rural poor farmers. And in eighteen forty five that that strain it was called fido fido thora. I think so, I think there's got to be some silent letters in there.
There's a lot of continents strung.
Together, and like you said, that came from North America and everything just rotted. And this was the natural part of it. So then you have England, the controlling body like needs to step in and do something, and they kind of did, but not to chin up.
Yeah, keep that grain coming our way.
Yeah, there was a Prime minister named Sir Robert Peel and he he provided a little bit of relief. He authorized import of corn from the United States. It helped avoid a little bit of starvation, but it was certainly not a problem.
No, And again they really did say, we're sorry you're having these troubles. We'll see what we can do, but keep those grain imports coming, because just like in the Wallow famine in Ethiopia, there were plenty of places in Ireland where there was grain in abundance, but the people
growing the grain couldn't afford it. Yes, And so because the people elsewhere were 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 Britain 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 live stock which must be fed that grain. So to add insult to injury,
they were saying, you guys are starving over there. Keep exporting that grain, but feed some of it to your live stock, and then export the live stock to us to eat.
Well. 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 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 there was in eighteen thirty four, there was something called the British Poor Law enacted in eighteen thirty eight in Ireland that said able bodied indigens 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 food get priced out of their own crop land and they can't afford to work any longer. 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. The guy who came after John
Peel or Robert Peel, not John Peel. The guy who came after Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, he did even less than Peel did, basically kicked it back to Ireland to deal with. But still give us 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. That's not okay. The
markets aren't equipped to deal with the famine. The famine happens when the market's break down.
Right, and you need assistance to correct that right, it doesn't just work itself out. So you know, Ireland already is not so happy to be under the thumb of
the British. This got even worse when there was this sort of attitude among sort of the elite of England that 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 in the long run.
Yeah. 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.
No, 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. There landlords couldn't afford the farms any longer either because they weren't able to collect rent, right, and so wealthier landowners said, I'll buy your farm and your farm, and your farm and your farm and your 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 formed these communities now were single large farms owned by single wealthy landowners. As a result, it's kind of like that saying, if there's blood in the streets by real estate, right, that's what those guys were doing. Yeah, not cool.
So in the end, this had a huge effect on the I mean, the way they put in this article. The demographic history of Ireland directly calls from the famine. Their population of about eight point four million in eighteen sorry eighteen forty four fell to six point six million just seven years later, and about a million people died
literally just died from starvation. And by the time Ireland achieved independence in night ten twenty one in nineteen twenty one, the population was barely half of what it was in the early eighteen forties. Yeah, because then that's not supposed to happen.
Death and immigration, Yeah, how many people? Uh? Another two I think a million died and another two million emigrated as a result.
Yeah. New York City, baby.
Yeah, that's how New York got to be in New York yep. So we've got 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, there's a lot of controversy, and there's a lot of controversy surrounding it, and 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. I'm not saying don't do that, but it's not addressing the real problems.
Right And apparently the real problems are autocratic rule.
Well one of them for sure, Yeah. Yeah. Another one is you know, just food education. 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 try and get people working on infrastructure jobs in the country.
In exchange for food.
Yeah, in exchange for food, and I would imagine money, I don't know that for sure, but I don't think it's straight up food.
I wonder if like, yeah, I wonder.
Maybe it seems like it'ld be a combination of the two or maybe not. I don't know.
Another one is hashing out early warning signs lackly. They have different scales now of food security to kind of gauge where a country is is far as it's spiral towards famine.
Yeah, like don't wait till you're seeing the UNISEF commercial right before you act.
But not only that, you government of this, the people that are about to enter into a famine, you need to do certain things, like there's a famine that 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, yeah, and they 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 cattle herders to move their their 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 can take. And there are early warning signs and apparently they are born out of famine codes from nineteenth century India.
Oh really, India.
Had a string of famines in the nineteenth century that killed like seventeen million people. Yeah, so they really started to pay attention to what made up the warning signs of famine.
Well, there is 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, 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. Emergency food assistant needs needs are
unprecedented in these four areas right now. Nigeria, Yemen, South Sudan and Somalia are the most of the areas of the highest concern and it 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 war is not on.
So there's one. In Yemen, extensive conflict has reduced incomes and food prices remain elevated. South Sudan conflict severely disrupted trade, humanitarian access, and livelihoods. Then finally Somalia. Somalia was the only one of the four that seemed like it was weather related, and it said that the December on as pronounced the eyr season. There are two rainy seasons, the goose season and the day or deer deer 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 a group that you feel good about, and give money, give time, do something. Don't just sit back and eat your big mac and forget about the whole thing.
Agreed.
If you want to know more about famine, you can type that word in the search bar at howstuff works dot com. Since I said search par it's time for a listener, mayil.
I think this one Trump's homelessness. Surely we won't get an email saying that people deserve children 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.
All right, I'm gonna call this one. Whatever happened to super fan Sarah? Remember that?
Mm hm? I remember Sarah Sparrow, the amazing twelve year old fan.
Right, yeah, So I listened to several podcasts per day, guys, 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 fun, Just the way to do it. The end of the podcast in twenty ten about grandfather's diets shortening our lives fascinating.
By the way, this is June twenty ten. You got the email from Sarah, who had been listening to the show since she was eleven. At the time she was thirteen, you mentioned you should go to our high school graduation be the keynote speaker. You were still doing this well twenty seventeen. My math is right. Then Sarah is twenty years old. That's crazy and halfway through college.
It's so crazy.
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 or she just you know, still listens and doesn't write.
In right, it's plainly cool.
Maybe so well she is, you know, twenty years old, right, it's not super cool to still be the Sarah the amazing seven for eleven year old man.
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 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 grow up and they forget about it.
It's true, so sad, but then they turn like forty to fifty and they'll come back. They'll be back. Well, if you want to get in touch with this for a while, make us feel pretty good and then forget about us, you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at house. Stuffworks dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff Youshould Know dot com.
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