Three Famines Read Online Free Page B

farmers and artisans in immediate peril. None of that should have killed the millions whose deaths are attributed to it.
    There were similar conditions of landowning between Bengal and Ireland, and Bengal and Ethiopia. The Famine Commission estimated that 7.5 million families depended on the cultivation of land. Of these, fewer than 2 million families held between two and five acres. That is, nearly three out of four families either lived on fewer than two acres or were landless. In good times, then, farming families were able to sell their surplus rice to pay rent and buy necessities in the market. But bad times were upon them.
    In November 1943, in addition to the other problems the Damodar River broke its banks and flooded large areas in Burdwan district. Hundreds of villages were devastated by the water, and rice fields lay utterly drowned beneath flood-water. Cholera now broke out and allied itself with other famine diseases.
    The seasonal rains elsewhere than Burdwan had fallen and caused no natural disaster, and a fair aman crop planted on larger farms, including land farmed by sharecroppers, seemedlikely. But in the later view of the Famine Inquiry Commission, the chief harvesting month of November was probably the critical month of the Bengal famine, since prices were still rising. It was at this point that the death rate reached its highest level. The acute period of starvation was passing, but epidemics were killing millions of the malnourished throughout the countryside. The disease that took more than any other was malaria.
     
    The trigger for the Irish famine was an agent nearly as voracious as army worms, a fungal spore named phytophthora infestans , which either travelled to Europe from America, where there had been a report of blight, on the prevailing westerly wind from the Atlantic; arrived in the holds of American ships; or both. Early in its European career it would afflict crops, particularly in Kent and the Isle of Wight, and elsewhere in England and then Scotland. But resultant want was not as acute in Scotland and England as in Ireland. The Scots, for example, though reduced to hunger, had better supplies of oatmeal and better fishing than the Irish.
    At the time, people knew nothing of the blight’s causation, and a Church of England clergyman, the Reverend J. M. Berkley, one of those clergymen whose undemanding work gave him room for natural research – which, in his case, led to an enormous understanding of moulds – and who described the blight as a ‘vampire fungus’, was not listened to.
    Yet that is how it manifested itself in Ireland – one day the potato flowers were blooming and rejoicing the cottier’sheart, then, overnight, everything had rotted. The mysterious fungus would within forty years be identified, and a treatment devised – copper sulphate. But phytophthora infestans is still with us, having built a resistance to sprays used against it throughout the twentieth century. It has at various stages attacked grape harvests, still infiltrates potato and tomato crops, and is now responsible for the failure of at least half of Russia’s potato and tomato harvests. Most remarkably, it has also been considered by both the Russians and Americans as a potential instrument of biological warfare, a means of attacking the crops of the enemy.
    The blight had led to a miserable Irish winter in 1845–6, but the people who planted their potato-seed crop in the spring of 1846 were full of hope for the late summer harvest. Then, after an early summer drought had in any case delayed the planting and growth of the tubers, continuous and heavy rainfall in late July and early August began to wash the spores of phytophthora infestans down to the tubers in the soil.
    When, at the end of the summer of 1846, the potato flowers came out and gladdened the Irish, and indeed the government, an evil awakening of blight was about to occur. The fungus had survived the summer in the moist earth and now,