People were starving to death in the midst of agriculturally productive land.
This can be due to at least three factors:
1.) Too much of the available land is devoted to cash crops for export and the proceeds are retained by elites, leaving the poor with neither land on which to grow or money with which to buy food.
2.) There is not enough land to support the existing population even if all the land is devoted to food.
3.) The population is surviving on food crops grown in commons areas of marginal agricultural value and the most nutritious of these food crops is struck by a blight or drought. This was the case in Ireland with the potato blight. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
the potato (a New World crop brought back by the colonisers whose journeys were in part funded by the super-profits obtained by disposession and Enclosure) was touted as the solution to the "Irish problem" -- land too poor to support wheat/beef (high prestige) farming would support potatoes (which when mixed with dairy form a remarkably nutritious diet)... anyway, the history of the Irish famine is too long and complicated for a drive-by post but colonial cash-cropping was definitely a big part of the big picture. someone must have more recent reading in the history of the Troubles than mine, and can fill in the gaps? The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
actually in Ireland I believe point (1) was a huge contributor: the best land was reserved for cash-cropping for staples exported to England, iirc. Ireland was operated as a colony of England, with English landlords supervising hacienda agriculture and the indigenous (so to speak) Irish dispossessed and shuffled off onto the worst, most marginal land.
