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My whole life, I've been told this one story about my family, about how my great great grandmother was killed by the mafia back in Sicily. I was never sure if it was true, so I decided to find out. And even though my uncle Jimmy told me, I'd only be making the vendetta worse. I'm going to Sicily anyway. Come to Italy with me to solve this 10 zero year old murder mystery. Listen to the Sicilian inheritance on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 how famines work from February 13, 2017. Pretty interesting stuff, and also a little bit sad.

Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I heart radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry the jeerster.

Should we say, what just happened? It's weird.

Or should we say focus?

Yeah.

Like, oh, what is this? 900, probably 20 something, 30 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 miso bothering you guys?

Right, exactly.

Is it smell?

Is this miso bothering you? That is 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. 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 tried 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 do you mean with, like. Like, just the jokes they would make? Aids jokes and famine jokes?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

You mean as far as.

Sure.

Just, like, the material they would make jokes about and that, like, they weren't even remotely funny, you know?

Yeah.

Like, not nuance or smarts or anything.

Yeah.

I think Sam Kinison made, like, starving ethiopian kid jokes.

Right.

Like, give him a sandwich. Cameraman. Wasn't that him?

Was that him?

I think so.

Like, you just. People can't do that today.

It's different world.

Yeah.

So, yeah, there probably won't be any jokes in this one. No, 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 us, as we'll see at the end.

Yes.

I just spoiled it, though, didn't I?

Yeah, that's. I'm glad you sent that, though. 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 real definition. But there's this guy who's a scholar of famine. His name is Cormac Ograda, 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, 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 that 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 a field to produce crops. And so the whole thing just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. Once it passes a breaking point, it really starts to spiral out of control.

Yeah.

It's a three pronged terror of poverty, hunger and disease, all contributing to one another.

Right. So Cormac Ograda's definition of a famine is a daily death rate of above one per 10,000 people.

Is that 10,000?

Yeah. All right.

It had a period and not a comma.

That's european.

And I didn't.

Is it?

It's gotta be, because that didn't. That's like zero, zero one of the population per day. Is that right?

Yeah, I think that is 10,000.

Okay.

Because just off the top of my head, like, the normal american death rate is like 823 per 100,000 people. So that is significantly more a daily death rate.

That's the first characteristic.

Yeah.

Number two is the proportion of wasted children is above 20%. 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 imagine.

Wasted children.

Yeah, man.

In any sense, it's not a good thing, but especially when it has to do with famine.

And then finally, the prevalence of what's called quash or core, which is, 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 potbellies. That's a classic hallmark of quash Corps.

Yeah.

Very sad. And then he went on to qualify it further with severe famine. That means a daily death rate above five out of 10,000, proportion of wasted children above 40%. And then that same Quashar corps prevalence.

Right.

So if Quashar Corps 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 the main distinguishing factor between famine and just what you would consider malnutrition. This is all tied into what we call food security.

Right.

And 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've talked a lot about the food, the green revolution, too, which factors in. But 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 country's 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 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, that's 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. 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, well, 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 overabundance 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, I think, mainly think of natural disasters or natural factors and political conflict is one of the big, big, big contributors, as we'll see.

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 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 19th 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 to feed everyone at this point.

Right.

And enough of a trade supply lines and government aid agencies and NGO's 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 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 2008, there were food riots in Bangladesh and Haiti and Egypt. Do you remember that?

Because of rice.

Right, it was cause 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 2002 and 2008, food prices rose 140% globally. And a lot of people got priced out of the market. And when they looked at what happened, apparently 75% 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?

Yeah.

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 cropland 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, that are starving, but.

Their country's starving to death, but they can't afford it because they don't have the money. So t's. But the rest of us do have the money, so keep growing that food.

Yeah.

It's for us, it's a 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 unit, the most recent stat I have is that 21,000 children die of hunger every day. Day yep.

Jeez.

Every 4 seconds.

Oh, that's awful.

Yeah, it's sobering, to say the least. So, you know, what happens is, especially if you're young or you're old, that disease sets in, and little kids and old people can't fight it like the parents can. And the parents are in bad shape, too. 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, 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 so 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, well, 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.

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Stop.

You should.

I know. All right, so I said we were 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 saying, hey, guys, there seems to be this movement toward looking at famines as the result of dictatorships.

Yeah.

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 Stern's perspective, 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. 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 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. Like, on a global scale. And that's when he said, you might want to look at some of these studies. One of them, there was a report from the UN inter governmental 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 2% cut in crop harvest each decade moving forward.

Yeah.

And it might not sound like a lot 2% 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 it's warmer, if things are melting.

That's true in a lot of cases.

Yeah.

And certainly more CO2 will increase yields in the short term, but in the long term, warming trends will make crops wilt, especially near the tropics. I saw one stat that said a three degree celsius increase in temperature at the tropics could cut corn crops by 20%.

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 CO2, 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 for crops.

Yeah, yeah.

Or either one over, like, a couple year period, you're not going to be able to grow crops or your 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.

Right.

Like, technology will take care of it always.

Yeah. And.

And the study from NASA, there's a more dire one 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 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 looked at famine as strictly a natural disaster.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

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 and the communists took over China in 1949, one of the things that Mao set his sights on Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong, 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.

Yeah.

So we're going to shock the system. We're going to take these old agrarian backwards ways, we're going to put them together in this great communist way, and we're going to squeeze as much productivity out of them as we can. We're going to funnel that money into the workers in the cities who are going to 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 was called the great leap forward. And it was a five year plan, which, you're right, it was. I mean, to call it ambitious, it was. What it was, was a disaster in the making.

Right.

Because what happened was, especially when you live under someone like Mao Zedong, you're gonna have people that are afraid to tell the truth about what's going on.

Yeah.

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 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 off locally, too. Like, if you were going to say, no, this guy's lying about crop yields.

Oh, yeah.

By lie, the local people would. Would take care of you.

Yeah.

You just disappear. And so what happened in 1958? This is an actual quote. Mao Tse tung said, to distribute resources evenly will only ruin the great leap forward. When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that the others can eat their fill. So this, 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 produce 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 the grain was turned into a commodity and people were given quotas to meat. 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 the. Than they had then they'd even grown that year 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 15 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 35 million deaths and 40 million people that weren't born because of all this.

Oh, yeah.

So a total population loss of 75 million. And it's still apparently, like, I looked into it today, it's very taboo to even talk about it today in China.

Right.

And they don't. They don't even 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.

Like that's the official 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, certainly not taught as the. 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 scholarship 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. Especially, like you said, if you grew up in the eighties, it was sort of the face of famine and drought. It was Ethiopia. And if you go back in time, Prime Minister Melis Zenawi, this was, what, more than 20 years ago at this point, 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 20 years, not only are we going to have enough food, but they're going to have the luxury of choosing what they eat. He was in office for 21 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.

Turns out, no, they had the worst luck with government.

Yeah.

So they had a famine in 1973 that the government basically just covered up.

Yeah, the Wallow famine.

Yeah.

And in that, 300,000 people died. And even though 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 1973, the same year that Emperor Haile Selassie spent $35 million on his 80th birthday celebration.

Right.

So, yeah, it's starting to kind of become clear what's going on.

And then the very famous famine, famous here in the west, the 1983 to 85 famine. Everyone who is funding that, that was when Band Aid came out.

They had that.

Do they know it's Christmas song? Yeah, they had the live Aid concerts. Phil Collins flew in the concord from London to Philadelphia to play two shows of the same night.

Do you remember Live Aid? How old were you?

You probably.

So this is 84. Yeah, I was eight.

Do you remember it happening? Like, did you watch it?

I remember the Phil Collins thing.

Of course you do.

Yeah.

Because he loved college. No, I totally remember. I was babysitting at a summer gig, a regular summer gig where I would babysit these kids, like, for half days, like, you know, Monday through Friday.

Right.

And I was babysitting these kids, and we watched Live Aid. And I remember seeing, of course, Phil Collins.

Sure.

And I remember seeing the amazing performance by queen. Like, it's still, like one of their, like, hallmark performances was their 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 gotta give. And band Aid and Live Aid raised $150 million in 1984 for famine relief 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 group that now makes up Eritrea, the eritrean ethnic group. And the government was, like, napalming the croplands 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, I talked about frivolous spending by the government. They spent that year in, I think, 1983. They spent between 100 million and $200 million to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the revolution, almost up to $200 million.

So here's the thing. I'm reading this article from Spin. I think it was written in 1986 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 shipments into the country just to make money off of it. If you said anything, your group would get kicked out. And apparently medicine song's frontier Doctors Without Borders had raised the alarms and they got kicked out of Ethiopia. And they went to Bob Geldof and said, hey, we know you have $150 million 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, nah, 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 $150 million to an autocratic government that was creating a famine in its own country.

Is that a new article?

No, it's from 1986.

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 the same article that's referenced that you sent. A Nobel Prize winning economist named Amartya Sin wrote a book called development is freedom and basically kind of backs up what we're talking about. Sin says that authoritarian systems are the ones who have famines, and they went back and did a historical investigation. And these are 20th century famines. 30 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. That has a lot of the same weather, a lot of the same soil conditions, growing conditions, cropland. Botswana. They said Botswana is a democracy.

Yes, since the mid 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, you're in power. So. 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 2010, they did a report called development without freedom, how aid underwrites repression in Ethiopia. And it just completely confirms all of this. Yeah, 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.

Bring a little optimism into your life with the bright side, a new kind of daily podcast from hello Sunshine, hosted.

By me, Danielle Robet, and me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more.

Thank you for taking the life, and you're gonna shine it all over the world, and it makes me really happy.

I never imagined that I would get the chance to carry this honor and help be a part of this legacy.

Listen to the bright side on America's number one podcast network. I heart. Open your free iHeart app and search the bright side.

I never thought I'd take my three young kids to Sicily to solve a century old mystery, but that's what I'm doing in my new podcast, the Sicilian Inheritance. Join us as we travel thousands of miles on the beautiful and crazy island of Sicily as I trace my roots back through a mystery for the ages and untangle clues within my family's origin story, which has morphed like a game of telephone through the generations. Was our family matriarch killed in a land deal gone wrong? Or was it by the sicilian mafia, a lover's quarrel? Or was she, as my father believed, a witch? Listen to the Sicilian inheritance on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

IHeart podcast update this week on your free iHeartRadio app Fodor's Guide to espionage, a sixties era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet sets around the globe. Tongue unbroken.

Season two.

This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for two, season two. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

So, Chuck, I think when most people think of famine, they think, if not of Ethiopia, than of Ireland, because Ireland had one heck of a famous famine back in the 19th century that actually created Ireland and the Irish as we know them today.

Yeah, the irish potato famine. Our cohorts, our colleagues Tracy and Holly at stuff you miss in history class.

Did they do one on it?

Yeah, I did a great episode just on this, so I recommend listening to that. Here's our knuckleheaded overview. This was also called the great irish Famine or the famine of 1845 to 49 because that's when it happened. This was one of the ones that initially was caused by disease. It was 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. They had, 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. 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 19th century in Ireland, there were a lot of irish farmers who were basically subsistence farmers. A lot of farmers in Ireland were small land farmers who were tenant farmers, which means they worked 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.

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 quinoa 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. And that's exactly what happened. It said in the early 1840s, almost half the irish population depended almost exclusively on the potato for diet, and especially the rural poor farmers. And in 1845, that that strain, it was called phytophora, I think.

So.

I think there's got to be some silent letters in there.

There's a lot of consonants strung together, phytophthora.

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 needs to step in and do something. And they kind of did, but not enough.

You said, chin up. Keep that grain coming our way.

Yeah.

There was a prime minister named Sir Robert Peel, and 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 solver.

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.

Yeah.

Cause 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 livestock, 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 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 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.

Right.

And so they were basically evicted. Hundreds of thousands of tenant farmers were evicted under these years. And there was, in 1834, there was something called the British Poor law, enacted in 1838 in Ireland that said able bodied indigents 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 cropland 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. Yeah, the guy who came after Robert Peel. Lord John Russell. He did even less than Peel did. He 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 a famine.

Right.

The famine happens when the markets 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 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 gonna 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. Their 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 farm. 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 form 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, buy 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 they put it in this article, the demographic history of Ireland directly caused from the famine. Their population of about 8.4 million in 1844 fell to 6.6 million just seven years later. And about a million people died, literally just died, from starvation. And by the time Ireland achieved independence in 1921, in 1921, the population was barely half of what it was in the early 1840s. Yeah, because that's not supposed to happen.

Death and immigration.

Yeah.

How many, like, people?

Another two, I think a million died and another 2 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. It's keeping people alive. They're not saying, don't do that. No, 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.

Yeah.

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'D be a combination of the two.

Sure.

Or maybe not. I don't know.

Another one is hashing out early warning signs. They have different scales now of food security to kind of gage where a country is as far as its spiral towards famine.

Yeah.

Like, don't wait till you're seeing the UNICEF commercial, before you act, but not.

Only that, you government of 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 happening, that there was going to be a famine. They said, we have food security. So the author of that Huffpo 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 herds closer to reliable water sources. There's steps and actions that governments that. 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 19th century India.

Oh, really?

India had a string of famines in the 19th century that killed, like, 17 million people. So they really started to pay attention to what made up the warning signs of famine.

Well, there is something. It was created in 1985, and it may have been based on what you're talking about called the Famine early warning systems network. And they monitor these trends in 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 are unprecedented in these four areas. Right now, Nigeria, Yemen, South Sudan, and Somalia are the most. The areas of the highest concern. And it has the reasons of concern right here. Nigeria, the Boko 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. I don't know how it's pronounced. D e y r season. There are two rainy seasons, the goo season and the dare or 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 aid 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 into the search barowowowowowowstuffworks.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

I think this one trumps homelessness. Surely we won't get an email saying that people deserve children deserve to die every 4 seconds?

I don't know. If we do, they'll all start with, I believe in a vengeful God.

All right, I'm gonna call this one. Whatever happened to superfan Sarah?

Remember that? 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 present, forcing me to dig way back through the archive instead of waiting for the newest one. So he's sandwiching, right?

That's smart.

That's the way to do it. At the end of the podcast in 2010 about grandfather's diets shortening our lives. Fascinating. By the way, this is June 2010. You got the email from Sarah, who had been listening to the show since she was eleven. At the time she was 13, you mentioned you should go to her high school graduation, be the keynote speaker. You were still doing this? Well, it's 2017. My math is right then Sarah is 20 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.

We're like the giving tree. We got ditched.

She ditched us and. Or she just, you know, still listens and doesn't write in.

Right.

She's playing it cool.

Maybe so while she is, you know, 20 years old.

Right.

It's not super cool to still be the Sarah, the amazing seven year old.

Or eleven year old man, your smelly old pseudo uncles.

But Sarah, if you are out there, hit us up.

Yeah.

Say hi.

Send us an email. We would love, love, love to hear from you.

Yeah, we'll 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 grow up and they forget about us.

It's true, man.

It's so sad.

But then they turn like 40, 50 and they'll come back. They'll be back. Well, if you want to get in touch with us for a while, make us feel pretty good, and then forget about us, you can send us an email to stuff podcaststuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyou should know.com dot.

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IHeart podcast update this week on your free iHeartRadio app. Fodor's guide to espionage a sixties era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet sets around the globe. Tongue unbroken season two this podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for two season two think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.