Show the importance of new crops for the poor.
Sometimes new crops make remarkable difference in the lives of the poor people. For example, with the introduction of potatoes in Europe, the poor began to eat better and live longer. In Ireland, the poorest peasants were so much dependent on potatoes that when disease destroyed the potato crop in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands died of starvation. Hungry children used to dig for potatoes in the fields that had already been harvested. Thousands of people emigrated in search of work.
