Famines in Austrian Galicia

Famines in Austrian Galicia were a common occurrence, particularly in the mid to late 19th century, as Galicia became heavily overpopulated. Triggered primarily by natural disasters such as floods and blights, famines, compounded by human overpopulation, led to starvation, widespread malnutrition, epidemics, poverty, an average of 50,000 deaths a year, and from the 1870s to the beginning of World War I, emigration.

The first known famines in Galicia took place from 1804 to 1806, and from 1811 to 1813. There was a relatively short period of famine in 1832. A new famine started in 1844 as part of the then-ongoing European potato failure and lasted until 1848. Brief recurrences of famine took place in both 1849 and 1850, due to the lack of potatoes. New incidents of famine took place in 1854-1855, 1865-1866, 1871-1872, 1876, 1880, and 1889. The last known famine in Galicia took place in 1913, but it was part of a wider famine affecting Eastern Europe at the time.

As a side-effect of the famines, the Galician peasants have been too malnourished to work properly, and had little immunity to diseases such as cholera, typhus, smallpox and syphilis. Stauter-Halsted describes a vicious cycle in which Galician peasants worked "lethargically because [they were] inadequately nourished and [not living] better because [they] work too little." Galicia was reputedly "the poorest province in Europe", with a weaker economy than Ireland during the same period. Responding to both the poverty and the lack of reforms, many Galician peasants emigrated to other parts of Austria, to Europe, and to the United States.