>> Didn't Ireland continue to export food to Britain during the famine?
>>
> Yes. There was plenty of food in Ireland, it just wasn't accessible to
> large sections of the population.
The Irish famine is one of the prototypical free market genocides. Someone else pointed out Mike Davis' superb analysis of the 19th century Indian famines, and it's the same story - merchants were shipping grain to the metropole while Indian peasants died by the millions.
There's another, more recent example which doesn't get a lot of air-time: Imperial Britain's murder of 2-3 million Bengalis in 1943. There's no evidence of a serious drop in food production, it seems the British were in a panic at the rapid advance of the Japanese Army into Burma and disrupted key trade routes. Prices skyrocketed, the British authorities ignored the problem, going so far as to turn down offers of help from the Americans, and millions of people died.
-- DRR