Abstract
READING the first annual report and accounts for 1948-49 of the Overseas Food Corporation*, the reader gets the impression that the high hopes with which the East African groundnut scheme was launched faded rapidly. Certainly, not only the hopes but also the scheme itself would have gone had not the Corporation been able to call, to the tune of £23,000,000, on the apparently bottomless purse of the British Treasury. Of this sum, about £14,000,000 is represented in the accounts by fixed and current assets, and £9,000,000 by "development, land clearing and agriculture". For the expenditure of the latter sum no return has yet been obtained. During the year 1948-49, 50,000 acres were sown to groundnuts and sunflowers, instead of the 600,000 originally planned ; but the clearing of the 50,000 acres cost nearly as much as the clearing of the 600,000 acres was expected to cost. Incredible miscalculations were made, and experience was bought at heavy cost to the taxpayer. Nevertheless, a beginning has been made which, had the scheme been laid down on a more moderate scale and carried out less extravagantly, would have been considered a good one. The report strengthens the opinion held in many quarters that the correct procedure would have been to gain experience on a 'pilot-plant' scale before launching out on to the perilous and uncharted seas of large-scale production. The work of the Scientific Department, established in January 1947, would probably also have benefited by being concentrated on a pilot plant instead of covering the whole field of actual operations, although it is clearly too early to assess research results after only two years.
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JACKS, G. Groundnut Scheme In East Africa. Nature 164, 1067–1068 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/1641067a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1641067a0