Britain's Great East African Groundnut Plan Described By English Farmer As Going Badly

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXVII, Issue 14927, 15 March 1949, Page 4

Britain's Great East African Groundnut Plan Described By English Farmer As Going Badly

£15,000,000 EXPENDITURE ON SCHEME WHICH IS BEHIND SCHEDULE

This is a report on Britain’s great ground-nuts (peanuts to you) plan—the costly, visionary scheme to turn 3,000,000 acres of East African bush into farmlands and grow groundnuts to make margarine and cooking fats for Britain, states Clyde Higgs, farmer, broadcaster, and traveller, writing in the Overseas Mail.

Basically it is a farming operation. Groundnuts resemble early dwarf peas., except that they throw out long suckers. It is cn these suckers, under the soil, that the groundnuts (or peanuts) grow. I am a farmer—l farm 2,000 acres in Warwickshire and it was as a farmer that I recently visited for the second time, on behalf of Britain’s agricultural journal, the Farmer and Stockbreeder, the main centres of the East African enterprise.

The groundnuts scheme is going badly. In two years close on £15,000,000 of British taxpayers’ money has been spent—three times more than the estimate —and the whole scheme is behind schedule. It was originally planned that by January 1949 the area under cultivation would be 600,000 acres. They will be lucky if they sow 55,000 acres this month. British housewives who swallowed.the promises with which the plan was launched, and the subsequent glowing progress reports, and who were expecting early benefits — more margarine, more cooking fats —are in for a big disappointment, . What has gone wrong in East Africa? The visionaries have tried to rush ahead of the few practical men. Need for Caution Early on it was obvious that clearing the bush, and, more important, getting tangled roots out of the soil, an essential for proper cultivation, was going to be a bigger job than anyone had foreseen. But did anyone at the top see the red light and recast the schedule, decide to go cautiously in a small way until an efficient means of clearing the ground and the subsoil had been found? No, they did not. . It was a “military operation. The super-planners back in London had arranged schedules which decreed that by certain dates so many thousands of tons of supplies and so many hundreds of people from home must be shipped out to East Africa — and that so many acres of bush must be cleared.

“White-Washing” Campaign

It looked fine on paper, but supplies were, and are, erratic, and they still do not have machinery tough enough for the clearing ,iob. The men in the “front line,” in the bush, have gone on nibbling and improving at great cost, and fighting with those intractable Kongwa thorn roots —and losing ground, and money, all the time. You cannot beat Africa with arithmetic. Urgent Need For Pause It is urgent that there should be a pause now, and that they should proceed with a small “pilot” scheme. If the Government persist in this grandiose, all-points-of-the-compass attack, they will have to harvest goldnuts, not groundnuts, to break even.

Now the actual growing side. Early reports have given the impression that all the agricultural factors had been taken into account —soil suitability, rainfall, fertility, etc. As a practical farmer I was appalled to find that so little has really been done. It sounds simple to say that because a three-acre plot has yielded y lb. of groundnuts then a 30,000acre plot will yield 10,000 times y lb. Any practical farmer knows that farming does not work out like that. The larger the area the greater the crop risks, and all the highpowered mechanisation in the world will not alter that.

No proper thought has been given to maintaining the fertility of the soil. They plan a rotation. But putting land down to grass every so often is not enough. You must have livestock on the grass. Root of Trouble

Has a start been made building up grazing herds? No, •it has not. Apparently the planners think that if the need arises they will suddenly be able to plan several thousand head of cattle.

At certain vital stages of his growth the groundnut is a thirsty little fellow, but no one was able to give me more than the sketchiest

data about rainfall in the areas I visited.

Surely it would have been simple business sanity to be certain about rainfall first. Apart from the growing problem, the danger of soil erosion is bound up with rainfall, especially in the tropics—and more especially in a tropical area where great areas of trees and scrub are to be cleared. That is how “dust bowls” are made.

I was dismayed at the frustration and general despondency among the men out there on the job. They went out keen to do an Empirebuilding job. They chafe at the misunderstanding of their problems, and they suffer sorely from lack of leadership and a welter of service titles, some of which date back to the 1914-18 war.

Some are quitting. When I was there scores of tractors and bulldozers were in the repair shops, beaten by the conditions, by a. gritty abrasive soil that blunts knife-edges in a matter of minutes, and by that fierce Kongwa thorn root. Amid these troubles cables were arriving from London demanding “Send urgentest latest acreage cleared.” No doubt someone at home was making a big weekend speech.

Bitterly I was told: “If speeches phrases back home could do the job, this brush and those Kongwa thorn roots would be cleared in a night.” Remote control is a failure, and yet it is now planned to shift even local headquarters to Nairobi. Very pleasant it is in Nairobi — civilisation, clubs, hotels, dances and cocktail parties—but it is hundreds of miles from the groundnuts scheme.

Since returning home it has become obvious to me that a “whitewashing” campaign is being prepared to try to gloss over the errors and losses that have been made. There is talk of revising the whole scheme. It will have to be revised and the changes must go deep. There must be a new and cautious aproach or many of the millions of nounds that are being thrown into docks, roads, water supplies and railways will be wasted. Why, there are even pockets of the cost-plus system operating out there. I think the British people had a stomnchful of cost plus during the war. There must be a new leadership, business leadership, and leadership on the spot, concludes the writer.