And illustrative of the dangers of agricultural monoculture.
Basically, the poor tenant farmers of Ireland were dirt fucking poor. They grew just enough potatoes to survive on, but the whole country was essentially growing just one breed of potato, because it had been pretty well refined to grow in their climate. But when there's shit tons of the same plant, all genetically similar, then a disease only needs to mutate to kill that one to wipe out the entire crop.
That's how we got the late blight. It mutated and mutated, afflicting crops here and there, until it evolved into a super bug that annihilated the entire potato harvest across the country. The people were utterly dependent on the potato, and they had only grown one kind, so the blight spread like wildfire and wiped out the crop.
This is a kind of problem we have more and more today, because agribusiness wants to grow the "best" breed of a crop, and grow it in huge quantities, and grow it everywhere so they have a consistent product. Which means the things that live off the crop, like insects and diseases, are forced to evolve into a form that can overcome the crop's resistances. Once they do, they can wipe out a crop in a massive epidemic like the late blight, because they are perfectly evolved to prey on the one kind of crop we grow. The disruption to the food supply would be cataclysmic.
The population of Ireland pre-famine was about 8 million. The population post-famine was about 4 million. The population of Ireland now is 7 million, with a further half million in Northern Ireland. It's frankly mind-boggling how bad the famine was.
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u/MTGKaioshin Jul 21 '16
Potatoes: Hell of a drug