Want a permanent solution? Lets cut off the aid. Foreign Aid is like stocking fish in a lake every year. It's not sustainable, and its going to continue until the end of time, unless you allow the fish to spawn. Sure, they are going to take a population dive at first, but they will come back eventually. Sure, thousands, maybe millions(?) may die, but it will be better for sustainability in the long run.
See this ege? This is why I'm willing to settle for subsidies for third world farmers for right now. Because so far all I've been getting is bat shit crazy as any other possible option.
Want a permanent solution? Lets cut off the aid. Foreign Aid is like stocking fish in a lake every year. It's not sustainable, and its going to continue until the end of time, unless you allow the fish to spawn. Sure, they are going to take a population dive at first, but they will come back eventually. Sure, thousands, maybe millions(?) may die, but it will be better for sustainability in the long run.
See this ege? This is why I'm willing to settle for subsidies for third world farmers for right now. Because so far all I've been getting is bat shit crazy as any other possible option.
And what I am saying is that it is not a solution. When you subsidize these foreign industries you're basically providing an excuse to maintain and even increase subsidies to our own industries. It just perpetuates the cycle.
The permanent solution is not to provide subsidies to them. The permanent solution is to cut off subsidies to our own industries. Do that, and you'll have done the third world a much bigger favor than all the foreign aid up to this date combined.
I would generally just prefer that companies with human rights violations tied to their product lines should be fined until it is no longer profitable for them to be evil.
This is a noble idea in theory, but it would be horrible in practice.
For one thing, I don't think it would be very effective, because I don't think it would lead to a decrease in cheap labor exploitation. It would just be an incentive for companies to hide their crimes better, probably through even harsher treatment of their workers. It would also be an incentive to escape punishment with the use of bribery and "lobbying." The fact is, fines work only when the crime is easy to detect and the perpetrators are somewhat easy to convict and punish. Otherwise they're just an incredibly inefficient means of enforcement.
For another thing, it would fuck everyone over. Once you start fining corporations for exploiting cheap labor, you'd essentially be taking away their only chance at competing with the emerging Asian markets. This would be a massive blow to the already struggling US economy and it would reduce the standard of living for everyone, especially the poor, who would no longer have the ability to afford a wide range of goods.
I'm against human rights violations. I'm also in favor of economic efficiency. It is somewhat fucked up that the system perpetuates the former while requiring the latter, but there's no need to fuck it up even more.
I agree with your first point but not your second. Are you referring to the poor in America or the ones our companies are paying (barely) in other countries? I think the most honorable thing the U.S. could do is stop trying to stay on top as the world's leading superpower and instead go for economic equality, especially in the places where they already have an enormous influence. I mean how many democratic countries have we destabilised for cheaper gas or bananas, or just so we can sell guns?
And what I am saying is that it is not a solution. When you subsidize these foreign industries you're basically providing an excuse to maintain and even increase subsidies to our own industries. It just perpetuates the cycle.
This really isn't true, not in the US. Our horribly bloated subsidies tend to go to megafarms, which overproduce to such a vast amount that they can't sell everything they have in the US because the US doesn't have a big enough market. Random small farmers in Africa arn't even a remote source of competition to competition in the US, much less overseas.
Still, the primary issue is cutting down on farms in the US first, since without that first step any subsudization overseas will be throwing food away.
You're missing the important difference though ege. One is forced (taxes) the other is not. Not purchasing free trade goods won't make the american farming subsidies go away. Until those go away this or do nothing at all are the options.
I've always found it funny (not haha funny) when people buy their fair trade coffee and then go dump a bunch of sugar in it - not ever giving it a second thought.
No, it's called letting them die. Flipping off a guy bleeding in the street because of circumstances you created isn't teaching him to be self sufficient.
For another thing, it would fuck everyone over. Once you start fining corporations for exploiting cheap labor, you'd essentially be taking away their only chance at competing with the emerging Asian markets. This would be a massive blow to the already struggling US economy and it would reduce the standard of living for everyone, especially the poor, who would no longer have the ability to afford a wide range of goods.
One thing I'm taking away from a lot of this is that forstalling the US economy by keeping things cheap isn't sustanable. Eventually, standards of living in China, India, and eventually Africa (the place you go once China and India are expensive) are going to catch up, and it's all going to be expensive for everyone everywhere. The standards of living for everyone are rising everywhere, and the rate at which industrial nations can catch up is rising exponentially. It's not going to be like Japan and Korea where it took them 30~40 years or where Taiwan took 30 years. They're not going to be 3rd world by any stretch for much longer. Hell, parts of China are pretty goddamn modernized now.
Anyway, if you want to keep people from being exploited, give them good jobs so that their economy can be boosted. Once they're making too much money for foreign business to want to deal with them, their own economy will be robust enough to need factories of its own and it should be self-sustaining.
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amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
Anyway, if you want to keep people from being exploited, give them good jobs so that their economy can be boosted. Once they're making too much money for foreign business to want to deal with them, their own economy will be robust enough to need factories of its own and it should be self-sustaining.
I don't know if it's possible, but that really made sense to me. If india eventually made enough to not be the outsource bitches of the world, they'd have their own good economy and we'd have more jobs back here in the states, in theory.
People saying Fair Trade is bad because of the subsidisation aren't considering the other benefits it brings. Nevermind that it in fact exists to give cocoa farmers, to take one example, the market price they need to maintain a sustainable living, it gives them stronger bargaining power towards the sellers of their produce by increasing their awareness of market trends and conditions as well as offering legal assistance, affords them to increase the efficiency of their production by introducing more advanced methods of farming as well as informs people of the need for crop diversification.
Then there's the fact that it increases consumers awareness of how their products are procured and so may encourage people to avoid products they know have been shaped by forces they find unsavoury.
Plutocracy on
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
No, it's called letting them die. Flipping off a guy bleeding in the street because of circumstances you created isn't teaching him to be self sufficient.
No, it's called letting them die. Flipping off a guy bleeding in the street because of circumstances you created isn't teaching him to be self sufficient.
If thats the price they have to pay.
If you're that comfortable with unpopular ethics wouldn't it be far less problematic to require birth control in exchange for food?
No, it's called letting them die. Flipping off a guy bleeding in the street because of circumstances you created isn't teaching him to be self sufficient.
If thats the price they have to pay.
If you're that comfortable with unpopular ethics wouldn't it be far less problematic to require birth control in exchange for food?
Id prefer to provide all of Africa with bottled water laced with high amounts of estrogen, but your idea is less evil. I don't like it.
Crumbly, how do you justify killing millions in the name of money exactly?
its not in the name of money
what he proposes is traditionally called "tough love"
and i think what he's trying to say is what diana ross has been trying to say since 1965
Crumbly, how do you justify killing millions in the name of money exactly?
Where do you get money from? How would the white man profit from cutting off foreign aid? We would lose alot of our slave labour and cheap cash crops. If anything, making these places self sustainable would force us to find new markets, create new industry, and be more provincial versus global in our productions. Hey, that is kinda about money, but it is only a side effect.
If we made these South American communities, not just the farmers, self sustainable, everyone wins. What they need is to be cut off from the global markets. Force these farmers away from monoculture, not reward them with more money like Fair Trade is doing.
Also, I am not some kind of insane sadist, I just like taking an issue from the extreme.
How much sustainability? I would say little to no reliance on foreign food products or energy imports would be a HUGE start. I mean, up here in Canada it is almost a possibility, but all of our natural resources are shipped elsewhere. The reasons millions would die is by cutting off foreign aid, especially food, you are going to kill people. The UN World Food Program feed something like 60 million people a year on average. The transition from cash crop to "crop" would also be tough because of the amount of soil degregation caused by the formentioned monoculture. Turn the money from the UN World Food Program into topsoil, and carpet bomb the amazon.
How much sustainability? I would say little to no reliance on foreign food products or energy imports would be a HUGE start. I mean, up here in Canada it is almost a possibility, but all of our natural resources are shipped elsewhere. The reasons millions would die is by cutting off foreign aid, especially food, you are going to kill people. The UN World Food Program feed something like 60 million people a year on average. The transition from cash crop to "crop" would also be tough because of the amount of soil degregation caused by the formentioned monoculture. Turn the money from the UN World Food Program into topsoil, and carpet bomb the amazon.
No reliance on foreign products, fine. But trade, when done correctly, allows more consumption by all than would have been possible had the two entities not traded. Also, in Canada, are bananas easily grown? Coffee, tea, cocoa, grouper? Do you, or any of your countrymen, enjoy these products? From what I see as your major exports ( http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/gblec04.htm ), would you as a country need all that, that you are worried about it being shipped out? Honestly, think before you decide that everybody would be better off if they just relied on themselves for food.
People saying Fair Trade is bad because of the subsidisation aren't considering the other benefits it brings. Nevermind that it in fact exists to give cocoa farmers, to take one example, the market price they need to maintain a sustainable living, it gives them stronger bargaining power towards the sellers of their produce by increasing their awareness of market trends and conditions as well as offering legal assistance, affords them to increase the efficiency of their production by introducing more advanced methods of farming as well as informs people of the need for crop diversification.
Then there's the fact that it increases consumers awareness of how their products are procured and so may encourage people to avoid products they know have been shaped by forces they find unsavoury.
You're wrong. Some people saying that Fair Trade is bad are taking into account all those things. You seem to be missing that it's possible to provide all those things good things you listed without introducing market-distorting effects that create incentives for further over-production of coffee.
Instead of creating an incentive for people to produce more and more coffee (which in case you hadn't realised, fucks up every other third world farmer not lucky enough to be one of the meager few on the Fair Trade benefits roster through stimulating further production and forcing the price of their crop lower), why not donate the extra twenty cents you would have spent on Fair Trade coffee to a grassroots NGO? A group that promotes development of rural African villiages, education for poor Africans, assistance for families to diversify away from cash crop production and provides legal assistance to farmers dealing with multinationals? Do you realise it's possible for a group to do those things without introducing price distortions that will further worsen the situation?
Fair Trade has good points and is a complex notion, agreed. But there are better ways to go about raising living standards in the third world than naively attempting to force up the price of cash crops.
Edit: I just realised that the guy I quoted mentioned cocoa, not coffee. And just in case Quid asks again, yes I'm well aware there are other Fair Trade products besides coffee. I don't think that much affects the relevance of what I've said.
Solvent on
I don't know where he got the scorpions, or how he got them into my mattress.
Raising awareness about the inhumane qualities of farm subsidies in developed countries is a much better way to spend our time than making sure that the African who we're buying our chocolate from got paid for his efforts.
Joe Consumer can do very, very little about the farm subsidies though. Those are part of huge lobbying schemes, and will take decades if not more to change. Especially considering the european farm subsidies can only be abolished if noone veto's them, so you have to convince every single member state. That's just not a reality.
So you do patchwork. Paying people somewhat decently for what they produce, even if it isn't the market price, may be a form of charity but at least it stimulates these people working, slowly building up.
Chocolate is even worse, because the price is low because we allow it to made by slaves. So you can never get a "market price" for chocolate until we get rid of the slavery, because guess what.... that sort of keeps labor costs down and makes nonslavery cocoa above market price.
making these places self sustainable would force us to find new markets, create new industry, and be more provincial versus global in our productions.
I vote for this. Economic globalism blows.
We feel like we need protection for how our people work, how our products are produced, how we live. But we won't afford those protections to other people?
If you buy locally produced goods, or goods from sane places you avoid the situation altogether. It no longer becomes profitable to exploit these people. You have to pay more but that is what market price should be anyway. We are not entitled to lower prices through the oppression of others.
JebusUD on
and I wonder about my neighbors even though I don't have them
but they're listening to every word I say
I would generally just prefer that companies with human rights violations tied to their product lines should be fined until it is no longer profitable for them to be evil.
This is a noble idea in theory, but it would be horrible in practice.
For one thing, I don't think it would be very effective, because I don't think it would lead to a decrease in cheap labor exploitation. It would just be an incentive for companies to hide their crimes better, probably through even harsher treatment of their workers. It would also be an incentive to escape punishment with the use of bribery and "lobbying." The fact is, fines work only when the crime is easy to detect and the perpetrators are somewhat easy to convict and punish. Otherwise they're just an incredibly inefficient means of enforcement.
For another thing, it would fuck everyone over. Once you start fining corporations for exploiting cheap labor, you'd essentially be taking away their only chance at competing with the emerging Asian markets. This would be a massive blow to the already struggling US economy and it would reduce the standard of living for everyone, especially the poor, who would no longer have the ability to afford a wide range of goods.
I'm against human rights violations. I'm also in favor of economic efficiency. It is somewhat fucked up that the system perpetuates the former while requiring the latter, but there's no need to fuck it up even more.
I am surprised this post was mainly unaddressed. Let me break this down.
There are major American companies that, it turns out, rely on actual, honest-to-goodness slave labor as a main part of their business model. The argument above is that, yeah, that sucks, but doing something about it would disrupt our economy since so many companies rely on slave labor. And thus, to save our economy the uncomfortable period of adjustment to not having slaves, we'll just need to turn a blind eye until we're so ridiculously rich that we can go without, y'know, slaves harvesting our cacao... which, incidentally, is a luxury good, not a staple.
And this argument is being treated seriously? This argument that is, largely, the same one used to justify plantation slavery right here in the USA? The argument we suffered a horrible civil war to settle, because, damn it, we believed it was the right thing to do, and it was? Now, though, the slavery is far away, even though we're still the perpetrators, so, y'know, meh. The economy is more important than the basic human rights of, shit, how many?
I like the America that sacrifices its comfort for its ideals better than the one that turns a blind eye to bolster the economy.
Edit: and calling it "exploiting cheap labor" is not accurate in this case. That's a problem, too, but a little bit more understandable and explainable. We're talking about literal forced slavery, not underpaid, poor working conditions.
Edit: I just realised that the guy I quoted mentioned cocoa, not coffee. And just in case Quid asks again, yes I'm well aware there are other Fair Trade products besides coffee. I don't think that much affects the relevance of what I've said.
So until our own subsidies are done away with what is your proposal to help sugar compete with corn?
I thought Ireland had plenty of other crops but the English took them?
Or do you mean they had no trade, and so no way of importing food when the potatoes died and the English stole the rest of the food?
Ireland had plenty of potatoes. They were easy to grow and people lived off them, and fed their livestock off of them. After the introduction of potatoes the population almost tripled over a few generations.
But there was no cash economy and no real trade. People just spent their time living in disgusting poverty, eating and growing potatoes and having children. It was a Malthusian nightmare.
making these places self sustainable would force us to find new markets, create new industry, and be more provincial versus global in our productions.
I vote for this. Economic globalism blows.
We feel like we need protection for how our people work, how our products are produced, how we live. But we won't afford those protections to other people?
If you buy locally produced goods, or goods from sane places you avoid the situation altogether. It no longer becomes profitable to exploit these people. You have to pay more but that is what market price should be anyway. We are not entitled to lower prices through the oppression of others.
Why stop at the level of nation states?
Let's make every town self sufficient.
Nay, every household.
Personally, I can't wait to spend all my time growing my own food with stone age tools and wearing animal pelts.
making these places self sustainable would force us to find new markets, create new industry, and be more provincial versus global in our productions.
I vote for this. Economic globalism blows.
We feel like we need protection for how our people work, how our products are produced, how we live. But we won't afford those protections to other people?
If you buy locally produced goods, or goods from sane places you avoid the situation altogether. It no longer becomes profitable to exploit these people. You have to pay more but that is what market price should be anyway. We are not entitled to lower prices through the oppression of others.
Why stop at the level of nation states?
Let's make every town self sufficient.
Nay, every household.
Personally, I can't wait to spend all my time growing my own food with stone age tools and wearing animal pelts.
Pfft! Stone Age tools? I got my hydroponics garden all set up. That'll make this whole plan work! Now I just gotta find a couple cows, and get a permit to house them on my apartment's patio.
You know, even if I had all that stuff, I better there are other people who would have an advantage producing a lot of that kind of stuff, due to the differences in our resources and local economies, compared to me. In fact, I bet some of the time that the advantage is so great that they can produce it and sell it to me, and even with the mark-up it will still be worth it to me to buy it.
I thought Ireland had plenty of other crops but the English took them?
Or do you mean they had no trade, and so no way of importing food when the potatoes died and the English stole the rest of the food?
Ireland had plenty of potatoes. They were easy to grow and people lived off them, and fed their livestock off of them. After the introduction of potatoes the population almost tripled over a few generations.
But there was no cash economy and no real trade. People just spent their time living in disgusting poverty, eating and growing potatoes and having children. It was a Malthusian nightmare.
That is very much not the history I learned as a child.
What I was taught (and subsequently read) is that the potato plants were blighted, and although there were other foods being produced, they were 'exported', often under armed guard, to England. The deaths could have been massively reduced if they had kept the other foods they were producing within Ireland.
Perhaps I've misread your post, as it seems to be implying that the potato famine happened purely because of monoculturing (which was hardly the Irish people's choice) and their dirty, Catholic ways. To an Irish person that is Holocaust-denying levels of offensiveness.
poshniallo on
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
edited June 2008
Nice slippery slope you guys are running up of.
But you know, somethings doesnt make sense. I mean why do we export stuff, but then we import that same stuff? Wouldnt it make since to not export that stuff and sell it here?
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And what I am saying is that it is not a solution. When you subsidize these foreign industries you're basically providing an excuse to maintain and even increase subsidies to our own industries. It just perpetuates the cycle.
The permanent solution is not to provide subsidies to them. The permanent solution is to cut off subsidies to our own industries. Do that, and you'll have done the third world a much bigger favor than all the foreign aid up to this date combined.
I agree with your first point but not your second. Are you referring to the poor in America or the ones our companies are paying (barely) in other countries? I think the most honorable thing the U.S. could do is stop trying to stay on top as the world's leading superpower and instead go for economic equality, especially in the places where they already have an enormous influence. I mean how many democratic countries have we destabilised for cheaper gas or bananas, or just so we can sell guns?
This really isn't true, not in the US. Our horribly bloated subsidies tend to go to megafarms, which overproduce to such a vast amount that they can't sell everything they have in the US because the US doesn't have a big enough market. Random small farmers in Africa arn't even a remote source of competition to competition in the US, much less overseas.
Still, the primary issue is cutting down on farms in the US first, since without that first step any subsudization overseas will be throwing food away.
It's let them become sustainable, not let them die.
That's just a side effect.
Anyway, if you want to keep people from being exploited, give them good jobs so that their economy can be boosted. Once they're making too much money for foreign business to want to deal with them, their own economy will be robust enough to need factories of its own and it should be self-sustaining.
I don't know if it's possible, but that really made sense to me. If india eventually made enough to not be the outsource bitches of the world, they'd have their own good economy and we'd have more jobs back here in the states, in theory.
Then there's the fact that it increases consumers awareness of how their products are procured and so may encourage people to avoid products they know have been shaped by forces they find unsavoury.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
If thats the price they have to pay.
If you're that comfortable with unpopular ethics wouldn't it be far less problematic to require birth control in exchange for food?
Id prefer to provide all of Africa with bottled water laced with high amounts of estrogen, but your idea is less evil. I don't like it.
its not in the name of money
what he proposes is traditionally called "tough love"
and i think what he's trying to say is what diana ross has been trying to say since 1965
:whistle: Stop
Where do you get money from? How would the white man profit from cutting off foreign aid? We would lose alot of our slave labour and cheap cash crops. If anything, making these places self sustainable would force us to find new markets, create new industry, and be more provincial versus global in our productions. Hey, that is kinda about money, but it is only a side effect.
If we made these South American communities, not just the farmers, self sustainable, everyone wins. What they need is to be cut off from the global markets. Force these farmers away from monoculture, not reward them with more money like Fair Trade is doing.
Also, I am not some kind of insane sadist, I just like taking an issue from the extreme.
Clearly, no. http://www.myfootprint.org/en/.
How much sustainability? I would say little to no reliance on foreign food products or energy imports would be a HUGE start. I mean, up here in Canada it is almost a possibility, but all of our natural resources are shipped elsewhere. The reasons millions would die is by cutting off foreign aid, especially food, you are going to kill people. The UN World Food Program feed something like 60 million people a year on average. The transition from cash crop to "crop" would also be tough because of the amount of soil degregation caused by the formentioned monoculture. Turn the money from the UN World Food Program into topsoil, and carpet bomb the amazon.
Also http://www.rprogress.org/publications/2004/footprintnations2004.pdf
No reliance on foreign products, fine. But trade, when done correctly, allows more consumption by all than would have been possible had the two entities not traded. Also, in Canada, are bananas easily grown? Coffee, tea, cocoa, grouper? Do you, or any of your countrymen, enjoy these products? From what I see as your major exports ( http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/gblec04.htm ), would you as a country need all that, that you are worried about it being shipped out? Honestly, think before you decide that everybody would be better off if they just relied on themselves for food.
A paradise of plentiful food but little trade.
Like Ireland, before the potato famine.
I thought Ireland had plenty of other crops but the English took them?
Or do you mean they had no trade, and so no way of importing food when the potatoes died and the English stole the rest of the food?
Don't forget about all those delicious babies.
You're wrong. Some people saying that Fair Trade is bad are taking into account all those things. You seem to be missing that it's possible to provide all those things good things you listed without introducing market-distorting effects that create incentives for further over-production of coffee.
Instead of creating an incentive for people to produce more and more coffee (which in case you hadn't realised, fucks up every other third world farmer not lucky enough to be one of the meager few on the Fair Trade benefits roster through stimulating further production and forcing the price of their crop lower), why not donate the extra twenty cents you would have spent on Fair Trade coffee to a grassroots NGO? A group that promotes development of rural African villiages, education for poor Africans, assistance for families to diversify away from cash crop production and provides legal assistance to farmers dealing with multinationals? Do you realise it's possible for a group to do those things without introducing price distortions that will further worsen the situation?
Fair Trade has good points and is a complex notion, agreed. But there are better ways to go about raising living standards in the third world than naively attempting to force up the price of cash crops.
Edit: I just realised that the guy I quoted mentioned cocoa, not coffee. And just in case Quid asks again, yes I'm well aware there are other Fair Trade products besides coffee. I don't think that much affects the relevance of what I've said.
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So you do patchwork. Paying people somewhat decently for what they produce, even if it isn't the market price, may be a form of charity but at least it stimulates these people working, slowly building up.
Chocolate is even worse, because the price is low because we allow it to made by slaves. So you can never get a "market price" for chocolate until we get rid of the slavery, because guess what.... that sort of keeps labor costs down and makes nonslavery cocoa above market price.
I vote for this. Economic globalism blows.
We feel like we need protection for how our people work, how our products are produced, how we live. But we won't afford those protections to other people?
If you buy locally produced goods, or goods from sane places you avoid the situation altogether. It no longer becomes profitable to exploit these people. You have to pay more but that is what market price should be anyway. We are not entitled to lower prices through the oppression of others.
but they're listening to every word I say
There are major American companies that, it turns out, rely on actual, honest-to-goodness slave labor as a main part of their business model. The argument above is that, yeah, that sucks, but doing something about it would disrupt our economy since so many companies rely on slave labor. And thus, to save our economy the uncomfortable period of adjustment to not having slaves, we'll just need to turn a blind eye until we're so ridiculously rich that we can go without, y'know, slaves harvesting our cacao... which, incidentally, is a luxury good, not a staple.
And this argument is being treated seriously? This argument that is, largely, the same one used to justify plantation slavery right here in the USA? The argument we suffered a horrible civil war to settle, because, damn it, we believed it was the right thing to do, and it was? Now, though, the slavery is far away, even though we're still the perpetrators, so, y'know, meh. The economy is more important than the basic human rights of, shit, how many?
I like the America that sacrifices its comfort for its ideals better than the one that turns a blind eye to bolster the economy.
Edit: and calling it "exploiting cheap labor" is not accurate in this case. That's a problem, too, but a little bit more understandable and explainable. We're talking about literal forced slavery, not underpaid, poor working conditions.
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Actually I don't get that analogy at all.
Ireland had plenty of potatoes. They were easy to grow and people lived off them, and fed their livestock off of them. After the introduction of potatoes the population almost tripled over a few generations.
But there was no cash economy and no real trade. People just spent their time living in disgusting poverty, eating and growing potatoes and having children. It was a Malthusian nightmare.
Why stop at the level of nation states?
Let's make every town self sufficient.
Nay, every household.
Personally, I can't wait to spend all my time growing my own food with stone age tools and wearing animal pelts.
Pfft! Stone Age tools? I got my hydroponics garden all set up. That'll make this whole plan work! Now I just gotta find a couple cows, and get a permit to house them on my apartment's patio.
That is very much not the history I learned as a child.
What I was taught (and subsequently read) is that the potato plants were blighted, and although there were other foods being produced, they were 'exported', often under armed guard, to England. The deaths could have been massively reduced if they had kept the other foods they were producing within Ireland.
Perhaps I've misread your post, as it seems to be implying that the potato famine happened purely because of monoculturing (which was hardly the Irish people's choice) and their dirty, Catholic ways. To an Irish person that is Holocaust-denying levels of offensiveness.
But you know, somethings doesnt make sense. I mean why do we export stuff, but then we import that same stuff? Wouldnt it make since to not export that stuff and sell it here?