The Irish famine was the result of successive failures of the potato crop, the staple diet of more than half the population of Ireland. Most people depended almost exclusively on the potato. In many places the only food was the potato, the only drink was water, the cabins were seldom protection against weather, a bed or blanket was a luxury, in most places a pig and a manure heap were the only possessions. Since the crop needed little labor to harvest and a small acreage furnished a large yield, it was ideally suited to the poor economy of Ireland in the seventeenth century. By 1700 it had largely replaced grain as the staple food of the majority of the people. The potato originated from America; so did the blight that ruined it in 1845. In many places the promise of an abundant yield was converted overnight into the certainty of ruin. Leaves curled up and shriveled, black spots appeared on the potatoes, and a stench lay over the ground. The Irish famine was the worst disaster in Europe in the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century throughout the western world population was rapidly increasing, in Ireland it was halved.