Every "Famine" is a Political Choice

From An Gorta Mór to Gaza

There was a time in the history of the world when famine and starvation were, in large part, the result of the vicissitudes of nature. From the dawn of agriculture to the dawn of the industrial age, people went hungry because crops failed due to rain or drought or heat or cold or blight — though, certainly, within the first thousand years of the agricultural experiment, humans began to play their role in bringing on the conditions that gave rise to famine by altering waterways, clearing the forests that brought rain, and depleting the soil, and with the beginning of civilization — the creation of enclosed settlements and warehouses storing food — there were those who chose to hoard food while others starved.

But in the past few centuries, there has never been a time when people starved because there was not a way to bring them food.

Despite growing up with some understanding of the brutality of the British colonization of Ireland, it was only in adulthood that I came to understand the nature of An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) — the event that most Americans call “The Irish Potato Famine.”

It is true that the blight that struck potato crops was the proximate cause of the catastrophic waves of starvation and disease that killed over a million people and forced over a million more to emigrate, often in the cargo holds of ships where their one suit of clothes would rot away on their bodies before they reached distant shores. It is also true that even to people of the time the events were a foreseeable consequence of forcing a nation of people to become tenant farmers growing a monocrop primarily for export on land owned by absentee landlords on an island systematically deforested to provide timber for an occupying power and deny cover to insurgents.

Throughout An Gorta Mór, malnourished people wandered the roads in search of food. Many fell down in the road and died and were buried by the thousands in mass graves in places like An Sciobairín/Skibbereen. The liberal position in England and among the Anglo-Irish aristocracy favored giving people food if they agreed to work building roads for the occupying power’s military or granting them private charity if they converted to Protestantism. (“Taking the soup” — a bargain the Salvation Army demands from Queer people today.) The conservative position held that the people’s poverty was due to their own moral failings and that it was better to let them starve.

Meanwhile shiploads of grain left Irish ports for England.

In modern terms, An Gorta Mór would be classified as an act of genocide.

More than a century and half later, there is not a single descendant of the survivors whose life is not in some way shaped by the cultural and genetic echoes of this atrocity.

Those echoes were strong in me when as an adult, I witnessed my own country starving the people of Iraq through an enforced blockade from 1991 - 2003, a policy which Irish diplomat and former United Nations Assistant Secretary General, Denis Halliday called “tantamount to genocide.” The death toll was exacerbated by the fact that the U.S. had bombed the nation’s water and sewage treatment plants and then blocked the importation of materials necessary to rebuild them and of medications necessary to treat waterborne diseases.

Those echoes are even stronger now as I read of how the survivors of the Israelu Defense Forces’ indiscriminate (and ongoing) bombing of Gaza are dying of starvation and disease while Israel allows only the most meager of aid deliveries to enter the occupied territory. While it can reasonably be argued that Hamas corruption and mismanagement were in part to blame for the widespread hunger in Gaza before the beginning if this war (though even then the Israeli government held a tremendous level of responsibility for the suffering of the Palestinian people,) those arguments are meaningless in the current humanitarian crisis. Even if Hamas had stockpiled emergency food supplies for people, those supplies would have been destroyed in the bombing that also destroyed hospitals, schools, bakeries, refugee camps, orchards, and almost all housing across northern Gaza. Even if Hamas is robbing aid deliveries, the aid crossing the border from Egypt is miniscule and pathetic in the face of the level of starvation and disease.

The World Food Program reports that 4 out of 5 people experiencing famine in the world right now live in Gaza. That famine is a political choice. And that choice cannot be justified.