Irish Potato Famine and Today

This post was inspired by an essay on the Irish Potato Famine of the nineteenth century on http://aradicalwrites.blogspot.com/

I must say Sir, that this is quite a fine piece of scholarship! It is inexplicable to me that it would have received no comments.

A sad commentary on the oblivious lurkers that make up the vast majority of those on the web. One must hunt for a considerable time before finding a work written with as much care as this one was.

As an American of Anglo-Saxon and perhaps Irish lineage as well, I don't have a particular side to take in this debate. Yet, one thing has always seemed pretty clear to me; there is quite enough fault to go around.
I will comment on two things that I think were of paramount importance in exacerbating the disaster.

There was great reliance on the skills of the "experts" both governmental and scientific. This was clearly unwarranted by the facts. I mention this only because in many ways, history is now repeating itself.

(Global Warming, and the current ongoing mass extinction, previously never seen without a cataclysmic asteroid impact or similar disaster.)

But whatever the detailed reasons, it seems to me that the central issue here was dependence on a monoculture crop. A single staple food.
The emphasis was overwhelmingly on the potato, and not even a diverse variety of different tubers. When the blight struck, even with excellence in science and government (which was clearly lacking) the disaster could not have been diverted.

In most of the world today, we rely on very few food crops. But worse, we are DELIBERATELY REDUCING the genetic diversity of many of these important crops, for purely, industrial and profit oriented reasons.

I think I will transfer this comment to my blog as well, a fairly new blog which has not, as yet, generated too much dialogue. I have apparently, largely been talking to myself.

You are welcome to attend.