Minister Of Food Answers Criticism Of East African Groundnuts Scheme

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXVII, Issue 14927, 15 March 1949, Page 3

Minister Of Food Answers Criticism Of East African Groundnuts Scheme

ROTATIONAL CROPS WILL PREVENT ANY POSSIBILITY OF . “DUST BOWL”

London, March 14

The Minister of Food, Mr Strachey, has been defending the East African Groundnut Scheme after strong Opposition criticism in the House of Commons.

He agreed that the scheme would cost considerably more than the estimate in the original White Paper, but added that the scheme might easily yield twice as much as was originally estimated.

The Westfield Report—the basis of the scheme had concentrated on producing 600,000 tens of oil seed from 2 500,000 acres, but scientific advisers in East Africa now said that the same amount could be got from other measures by growing sun

flowers, another oil-bearing crop, in a ten-year rotation plan. For half the ten years the land would be under grcunnuts, three under sunflowers, and the other two under grass or possibly cereals. One of the points made by Mr Strachey was that 2,000,000 acres was not the revised target for the scheme. He sai'd it v/ould be utterly wrong at this stage to settle the limit of land to be cleared. He reminded Opposition critics

who said that it had been a poor achievement to have cultivated only 50,000 acres up to now, that this represented a strip of Great Britain a miie wide from London to Portsmouth, a distance of 75 miles. Progress had not been so good as had been hoped, because of the shortage of steel for heavy tractors and railways. He did not share the Opposition’s fear that a dust bowl would be created in East Africa like that in the Middle West of the United States. The American dustbowl, he said, was the result of private enterprise farming. The Government proposed to keen the East African scheme tightly under socialised control, and the growing of sunflowers as one of the rotation crops would help in defeating a dust bowl. So far the cost of the groundnut scheme was £20,000,000 and might be substantially more, depending on the speed of development. The whole scheme would take ten years to complete and one of its benefits would be better communication in East Africa.

Mr Strachey concluded his survey by expressing confidence that the scheme would become one of _ the acknowledged stores of the British Commonwealth.

The debate was opened for the Opposition by Captain Cruickshanks, who attacked the Government’s handling of the scheme as one of muddle,. mismanagement, miscalculation and waste with no appreciable results. He urged that a commission of inquiry should be sent out to East Africa to find out What had gone wrong.