FYI for other readers, Mises is an Austrian Economics think tank with Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano on the board [0].
It's true that food shortages don't necessarily lead to famine. However, the potato harvest did drop by 80-85% [1], and the social structure of Ireland turned that stressor into a famine. You could thus say that the system in Ireland was overly dependent on the potato. The article is saying that the Irish system was too dependent on the potato, but they're focusing on the faults of the system rather than the food shortages.
That said, I also disagree with this article. It is true that the famine was not the direct killer, but blaming the deaths during the potato famine on disease caused by workhouses is very suspect. From wikipedia [2]
> The diseases that badly affected the population fell into two categories famine-induced diseases and diseases of nutritional deficiency.
> The malnourished are very vulnerable to infections; therefore, these were more severe when they occurred. Measles, diphtheria, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, most respiratory infections, whooping cough, many intestinal parasites, and cholera were all strongly conditioned by nutritional status.
The trouble was that there wasn't enough food in Ireland, and it wasn't getting to everyone. I don't know enough about the tariffs and corn laws to comment, but it seems suspicious to me that the article mentions tenant farming and conversion of cropland to pasture, and blames the issues on tariffs? Then, they say that private charity would have made up the difference in food production? I don't doubt that the workhouses were worthless when the problem was lack of food, but I would suspect that land redistribution would have better prevented conversion to pasture than tariff/tax reform.
It's true that food shortages don't necessarily lead to famine. However, the potato harvest did drop by 80-85% [1], and the social structure of Ireland turned that stressor into a famine. You could thus say that the system in Ireland was overly dependent on the potato. The article is saying that the Irish system was too dependent on the potato, but they're focusing on the faults of the system rather than the food shortages.
That said, I also disagree with this article. It is true that the famine was not the direct killer, but blaming the deaths during the potato famine on disease caused by workhouses is very suspect. From wikipedia [2]
> The diseases that badly affected the population fell into two categories famine-induced diseases and diseases of nutritional deficiency.
> The malnourished are very vulnerable to infections; therefore, these were more severe when they occurred. Measles, diphtheria, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, most respiratory infections, whooping cough, many intestinal parasites, and cholera were all strongly conditioned by nutritional status.
The trouble was that there wasn't enough food in Ireland, and it wasn't getting to everyone. I don't know enough about the tariffs and corn laws to comment, but it seems suspicious to me that the article mentions tenant farming and conversion of cropland to pasture, and blames the issues on tariffs? Then, they say that private charity would have made up the difference in food production? I don't doubt that the workhouses were worthless when the problem was lack of food, but I would suspect that land redistribution would have better prevented conversion to pasture than tariff/tax reform.
[0] https://mises.org/about-mises/add-board-and-finance
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Potatoes_Production_Great...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Death_t...