Talk about rewriting history! A shortage of potatoes occurred because the British exported their potatoes leaving millions of Irish to starve to death. A shortage occurred because, as in America too, there had been successive waves of potato blight, bringing reduced crops for a number of years. Blight destroys the potato tuber itself and then the plant. It reached a peak in Ireland around the 1840s, and no-one in the world knew how to stop it. Large numbers of Irish farmers were by then totally dependent on the crop for both food and trade. The British were faced with the same problem the UN faces today when there is a famine: do you supply massive aid and kill off any hope of indigenous farming keeping its head above water, or do you try to provide new work so that the people can earn enough to buy some other food? Remember even posing that question requires a degree of hindsight. The British had neither the experience of the UN nor its resources: they started with the latter option, but were supplemented by various charitable bodies in England who thought the first option was more appropriate. But neither approach had the resources or technology to prevent the huge numbers of deaths: remember too this was a part of Britain and the nation saw it as a British tragedy as much as an Irish one. I lost ancestors in the famine. They were poor tenant farmers in Roscommon. The surviving remnants of my family scattered to various parts of America, and it's only now we are re-establishing family links. It was a disaster, true enough, but certainly not one caused by the British exporting totally inedible potatoes! cheers Maggie