Parallels in famine-stricken societies

THE Great Irish Famine wasn’t just down to potato blight and the current crisis in East Africa isn’t solely the result of drought, according to Newmarket man Dr David Nally.
A lecturer at the University of Cambridge, his book Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine has recently been published.
Dr Nally believes while famines are sometimes explained away as the result of simple crop failures, there are generally less obvious causes. “My point is that famines are rarely natural catastrophes. That’s something I strongly emphasise, questioning the sense that famines are caused by an absolute failure in food. That’s rarely the case, that food is completely wiped out.”
Even as people starved to death in Ireland food was being shipped out of the country, while Africa still has resources that could be used to feed its population. “Right throughout the Irish famine exports continued. We constantly hear about the Irish living in a pig and potato economy, that the poor ate potatoes for their three meals a day and had a pig that they sold to pay the rent. But side by side with that was a more lucrative kind of agriculture that was based around wheat, oats, barley and livestock. Today, we call that a bimodal economy, with a subsistence sector side by side with an export/commercial sector. The commercial sector continued to export, the subsistence sector was the one that was hit.
“There are parallels with that today. The media image of Africa is of a very poor place, disease ridden, poverty ridden, hunger stricken but Africa exports large amounts of oil, diamonds, gold, 80% of the world’s uranium comes from Africa and on and on one could go. While there are people starving, there are resources that could be used for local subsistence needs.”
He doesn’t agree with the extreme nationalist view that the Irish Famine was a genocide but neither does he believe that the British Government of the day were blameless. Dr Nally also feels that aid and food supplies are still often linked to political policy, something that can result in people starving.
In Ireland, decisions were taken not to ban exports of food, while soup kitchens were discontinued. Likewise, banning the distillation of alcohol would have saved grain but this wasn’t done. “The Government refused to do any of these things because they believed the State shouldn’t interfere in the workings of economic markets. This was an ideology that killed people.”
Ideology is still getting in the way of saving people from starving to death, in his view. “Aid is still used as a political weapon. It was used in the North Korean famine in the mid-1990s. The US Government said no aid without negotiation over nuclear arms. Today, the US Government say they won’t deliver aid to certain regions in Somalia that they believe are controlled by Islamist militant groups. On the other side, conversely, you have Somali leaders that say there’s no famine whatsoever because they don’t want anyone from the outside providing relief and undermining their authority and status as a local warlord or political leader.
“You have people starving in between the two ideological views. The US not wanting to have funds leaked to Islamic militants, so food aid gets brought into the logic of the War on Terror and Somali leaders saying that they don’t want any outside US influence.”
There are slightly more obese people in the world than there are starving and its getting tougher for those at the bottom. “Currently, there are 925 million undernourished people in the world and about one billion who are obese. There is almost perfect symmetry between a planet of stuffed and starved people. Global food prices have been rising since 2007 and it’s pushing the poor beyond the margin of being able to afford the basic commodities. We have things like biofuel production so we’re now using crops for energy rather than food security. These kinds of things will potentially make more people land and food insecure.”
Dr Nally doesn’t want to see famines explained away as simply natural disasters and he feels the developed world has to recognise its role in Africa’s struggle. “It’s easy to get compassion fatigue; when crises drag on, something else fills the newspapers. But the more it can be shown that we are implicated in the lives of the people that are suffering, the more responsibility we have to do something about it. I’m quite keen to interrupt the dominant view that people are starving because of environmental collapse or because their agricultural practices are pre-modern. These views depoliticise famines and tend to blame the victim. When you situate Africa in the global economy, it’s incredibly important. We’re engaged with Africa, our governments are engaged in trade relations that are often very skewed. They get paid very little for the commodities they provide. You or I probably don’t produce any food but we’re fine and the people who grow food are starving, that’s a real paradox isn’t it?”

Clare suffered a ‘monumental demographic tragedy’

THE Great Irish Famine is one of the worst famines ever recorded and Clare suffered more than most parts of the country, according to Dr Nally.
“The overall mortality rates during the Irish Famine are among the highest in recorded history, it was huge. It wasn’t a regional catastrophe, it was a national catastrophe. It was a huge, monumental demographic tragedy.”
While the whole country was affected to some degree, Clare suffered particularly badly, he adds. “Clare was one of the worst affected areas during the famine. It had a population decline of about 26% in 10 years, extreme population decline and conversely, it had one of the lowest emigration levels during the famine, which is really interesting. What that signifies is that people were so badly off, they couldn’t even get out. It was usually those who had some small amount of capital that could afford the cost of emigration to Liverpool or New York or wherever.”
Those who did survive were haunted by the Famine. It cast a long shadow. “The Irish language had been in decline but the Famine was a huge social haemorrhage and the language never recovered. There was embarrassment too. Famines force people into impossible kinds of decision-making, you have to decide to feed one child and not another; you may have to turn your back on your neighbour to feed your family. Pre-famine Irish culture was portrayed as very convivial and sociable but the post-Famine description is of a culture in shock suffering from the evictions, suffering from displacement and the embarrassment of making those choices. I think people just wanted to forget for a period of time.”
He says that a heightened sense of place is something that is probably tied up with the trauma of the Famine. “The Irish are often told they’re obsessed with history, so someone from Ireland working on Irish history may seem to verify that cliché but I would say if Irish people are obsessed by anything, it is place. The first thing an Irish person will typically ask you is ‘where are you from?’ and there are historical reasons for that. The history of the Famine is a history of ejection, a history of displacement, a history of emigration. It’s the ejection from place and the memory and trauma of that, which I think feeds into our sense of place today. I think it probably fed into my desire to work on Irish topics from a geographic perspective.”
He has been at Cambridge for five years and he is very comfortable there. “I’d never visited Cambridge before I went to interview for a job there. In a sense, it did have that big aura and I was anxious about the interview but I was fortunate enough to do a good interview and to get the job there. It’s a great place to be, it was recently ranked as the number one university in the world in terms of research. It’s an exciting intellectual environment, the geography department is one place within the university but there are so many other centres, so many other talks and top rate academics coming through giving talks in the evening.”
Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine is the result of a huge amount of research. He says he tried to write it in a manner that would make it as accessible as possible. “I was working on my book for about eight to 10 years. It’s kind of a radically revised version of my PhD thesis. PhDs are academic tomes and not many people read them. Not many people might read academic books but I’ve tried to write in a way that appeals to a bigger audience. At least I’ve tried to do it, I’m not saying I’m successful.
“I spent a lot of time trying to write about complex ideas in a comprehensible way and it’s a difficult thing to achieve. The first time I ever taught in UCC, I realised that you don’t necessarily fully grasp a complex idea unless you can explain it to 120 undergraduates and they get what you’re talking about. If you can’t do that, you could say the students need to develop and so on but in reality, it’s a problem of communication. You can explain complex things quite simply but it takes time. That’s why the book took about 10 years. That’s my excuse anyway,” he said.
He hopes the book will be read by some outside of academic circles. “Ireland has a huge record of non-academic people reading serious literature. People in Ireland are generally well versed in history and have a good sense of global history, not just Irish history. I don’t suppose I’ll be rivalling Cecilia Ahern or Maeve Binchy but I’d hope to sell some copies. I’d like to generate some interest,” he concluded.