Famines in Austrian Galicia

Triggered primarily by natural disasters such as floods and blights, famines, compounded by 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.

[3][4] The famine of 1847 was partially caused by the unrest of the previous year (see Kraków uprising, Galician slaughter).

[2][11] In the 19th century, most of Galicia was part of the Austrian Empire (later Austria-Hungary), which acquired it through the partitions of Poland, and was its poorest province.

[12] Neither the mostly Polish large landowners, nor the Austrian imperial government, showed much interest in reform, such as industrialization, which would upset the system in which Galicia was a provider of agricultural products for the rest of the Empire, and a market for inferior industrial goods, a situation profitable for both the governments and the landowners.

[15][17][18] The situation was compounded by the lack of good land and growing population, resulting in the steadily diminishing size of an individual peasant's plot.

[11] As a result, Galician peasants have been too malnourished to work properly, and had little immunity to diseases such as cholera, typhus, smallpox and syphilis.

[11][15] Responding to the poverty and lack of reform, many peasants chose to emigrate, to other parts of Austria, Europe, and the United States.