The Crop That Emptied a Country

It is not only bananas. In the 1840s, much of Ireland lived on a single kind of potato — the Lumper — grown because it was cheap and abundant, planted across the country in vast identical fields. Then a water mould arrived from across the Atlantic, a blight the Lumper had no resistance to, and because every plant was effectively the same plant, it tore through all of them.

The crop that fed a nation rotted in the ground in one season, then the next, and the next. Roughly a million people starved; another million fled, reshaping the world's map of who lives where. A catastrophe of that scale, from one microorganism — made possible only because a whole people had staked their survival on a single uniform crop.

Monoculture is efficient right up until the moment it is lethal.

And if one blight can empty a country — how thin is the variety feeding the world today?