Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Famines Work

Episode Date: April 13, 2024

It's common knowledge that famines are usually caused by major droughts: Rain doesn't fall, crops don't grow, and people go hungry. But recent research suggests that while weather may trigger famines, they may actually be more of a human-made catastrophe. Find out more in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay, and me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. 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 hundred year old murder mystery. Listen to the Sicilian inheritance on the iHeart radio 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 13th, 2017. 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 Jerster. Should we say what just happened? It's weird. Or should we say focus? Yeah, like, oh, what is this?

920 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 me so bothering you guys? Right, focus. What does that mean? Usually she goes, huh, what? I don't get it. Is this me so bothering you guys?

Right, exactly. Does it smell? Is this me so bothering you? That is so Jerry. Focus. All right. I feel pressure now. I do, I'm a little off now, Jerry.

Thanks for that. 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 Chuck 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 80s stand-up comedians? Like they would make yeah, just the worst jokes that just would not fly They'd get chased off stage by what do you mean with like like just the jokes? They would make AIDS jokes and and famine jokes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you mean as far as sure

It's just like the material they would make jokes about and that like they weren't even remotely funny, you know Yeah, like it was not nuance or smarts or anything. Yeah, I think it's Sam Kenison made like Starving Ethiopian kid jokes, right? I give him a sandwich cameraman. Wouldn't that him? Was that him? I think so. Like, you 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.

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.

I'm glad you said that though. That was relevant. Yeah. So everybody has a pretty good idea of what famine is. It's when you run out of food and a bunch of people start dying. That's actually pretty close to the real definition. But there's this guy who's a scholar of famine. His name is Cormac O'Grada. 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 right very much more easily because you are So undernourished right and we'll find out too. It's a it forms a bit of a vicious cycle like as people start to

Get hungry and start to starve, 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.

Right. All contributing to one another. Right. So Cormac O'Grada'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 0.0001% 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. Right. So that is significantly more. All right, so that's- For 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.

Good for you. But especially when it has to do with famine. And then finally, the prevalence of what's called quashrocor, which is, it's basically an extreme malnutrition due to protein deficiency. Yeah, and those pictures, everybody who grew up in the 80s and saw the pictures of the starving children in Africa, they were just little skin and bone kids, but they had

these huge bloated potbellies. That's a classic hallmark of kwashur kor. Yeah. Very sad. And then he went on to qualify further with severe famine. That means a daily death rate above five out of 10,000, proportion of waste to children above 40 percent, and then that same kwash or core prevalence. Right, so if quash or core is around, you got a famine on your hands. That's not a normal thing that happens in a normal food secure population. Yeah, and that's 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 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, it 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 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, you know, never met, was that not only would they have food one day readily available, but be able to choose what they wanted to eat.

Like, there's something you don't think about, you really take that for granted here in the United States and elsewhere. It's not just having food, but like, oh, I might like to eat this or that, you know? Alright, so a lot of things can affect this food security and we're gonna talk about all these as throughout the show as they relate to famine, but obviously You think of natural disasters first and probably drought first. Yeah, that's a that's a big one 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 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. Yeah, 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, 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? Mm-hmm, 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 from the 19th century on has largely been that plus government factors. Yeah. Does that sound about right? Yeah. All right. 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 trade supply lines and government aid agencies and NGOs 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 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And when they looked at what happened, was 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?

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. So, T.S., but the rest of us do have the money, so keep growing that food. Yeah, 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 UN, the most recent stat I have is that 21,000 children die of hunger every day. Day? Yep. Geez. 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 young or 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. 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, then 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 move like moving to a different place to get food yeah so a disease can just rip through a population well yeah and that's 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.

[♪ Music Playing. Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay, 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 light and you're going to shine it all over the world, and it makes me really happy.

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which is 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. I Heart podcast update this week on your free I Heart Radio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, a 60s era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer Eugene Fodor as he jet sets around the globe.

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All right, so I said we're gonna talk about historical famines I lied that's coming later That all right. Yeah, that's fine. All right, so we're gonna 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. He's basically wringing the belly 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 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. 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 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 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 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- If it's more places 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 3% – I'm sorry, a 3 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. Not enough seeing more and more it seems. Yeah, too much rain. Severe weather is not good for crops. 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 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. And 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 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 something called, when Mao took over,

when 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. It 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, it 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 gonna catch up to productivity To the productivity of the UK or the US within 10 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 Tse-Tung, you're gonna have people

that are afraid to tell the truth about what's going on. So what happened from the very beginning is officials, either driven by fear or just because they were so caught up in the movement, started 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, the local people would take care of you. Yeah, you would just disappear. And so what happened in 1958, this is an actual quote, Oh yeah, by 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 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 the... Than they had, than they'd even

grown that based on these false reports, right? So people started to starve. Clearly Mao had no problem with it because it was the people out in the, 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. And 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 title. 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. It's certainly not taught as the the result of a

calamitous government policy. Yeah. 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, they were especially like you said, if you grew up in the 80s, it was sort of the face of famine and drought. It was Ethiopia. And if you go back, you know, back in time, Prime Minister Melis Zinaoui, this was what, more than 20 years ago

at this point, that when I mentioned earlier what his vision for the country, he said, you know, I hope in 10 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 governments. Yeah. luck with weather. It turns out no, they had the worst luck with governments. 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 Walla 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 he's starting. 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 at the same night. Do you remember Live Aid? How old were you?

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 Phil Collins. No, I totally remember.

I was babysitting at a summer gig, a regular summer gig, where I would babysit these kids for half days, like 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. It's still like one of their hallmark performances was their Live Aid.

But yeah, 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. There was all these great pictures of, or not great pictures, but there were pictures spread far and wide that were waking up the West, like guys, there's a huge problem, you've 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 crop lands there, blowing up cargo transports, blowing up farmers markets to affect the food supply and to create a famine. It was a manmade famine. Yeah, and not only that, you know, I talked about frivolous spending by the government. They spent that year in, I think 1983, they spent between a hundred million and two hundred million

dollars to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the revolution. Almost like up to two hundred million dollars. Right. 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 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 Songs Frontiers, 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 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. All right. I need to check that out.

Yeah, it's called The Terrible Truth About Band-Aid. About Band-Aid. Yeah. Well, there's a great book in this same article that's referenced that you sent, a Nobel Prize winning economist named Amartya Sen wrote a book called Development is Freedom, and basically kind of backs up what we're talking about. Sen says that, you know, authoritarian systems are the ones who have famines. Yeah.

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 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. Yeah, since the mid-60s. Yeah, it has been since the 60s. 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're in power and they can't do anything to change it.

Right. They don't need your vote or your support because they've got a barrel of a gun at you. That's how they stay in power. Yeah, a group called Human Rights Watch, which is great. I know we've talked about them before 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 is 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 Robay. 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 light and you're going to 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, iHeart. 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 is 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. I Heart podcast update this week on your free I Heart Radio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, a 60s era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer Eugene Fodor as he jet sets around the globe. Tongue Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two Season 2. 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, then 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.

Do they do one on it? Yeah, 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 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. 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. 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 are 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 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. Right. And that's exactly what happened. Yeah. 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 strain, it was called phytothora. I think so. I think there's got to be some silent letters in there. There's a lot of continents joined together. It's 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,

like needs to step in and do something. And they kind of did, but not enough. They said, chin up. Yeah, probably. 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 the 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. 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. And so because 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 so frustrating to look at through a modern lens of 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 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 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 a 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. 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 10 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. 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 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.

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 cost from the famine, their population of about 8.4 million in 18, sorry, 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 emigration. Yeah, how many like people? 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 New York. Yep. So, 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 manmade, 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. 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. Yeah. Aid is great, you know, it's keeping people alive. Right. They 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. 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'd be a combination of the two. Sure.

Or maybe not, I don't know. Another one is hashing out early warning signs. Apparently they have different scales now of food security. You kind of gauge 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 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 happening, that there was going to be a famine. They said, we have food security. And 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 like reliable water sources. 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 19th century India. Oh really? India had a string of famines in the 19th century that killed like 17 million people. Yeah. So they really started to pay attention to what made up the warning signs of famine. Well there is something that 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, are the areas of the highest concern. And it has the reasons of concern right here. Nigeria, the Boko Haram 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 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 conflict, conflict, conflict. So if you care, if you wanna 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 wanna know more about famine, you can type that word in the search bar at howstuffworks.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 four seconds. I don't know. If we do, they'll all start with, I believe in a vegetable god. All right, I'm gonna call this one, whatever happened to super fan Sarah?

Remember that? Mm-hmm. Sarah Sparrow, the amazing 12-year-old fan, right? Yeah, so I listen 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 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 11 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 2017 my math is right then Sarah is 20 years old. that's crazy and halfway through college 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 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. Just playing it cool. Maybe so.

Well, she is, you know, 20 years old. Right. It's not super cool to still be the Sarah, the amazing seven year old or 11 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 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 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 stuffpodcasts.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyousshouldknow.com.

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