Groundnuts Epilogue
The two articles in The Times in which Professor Frankel, of Oxford, has commented on the decision of the Overseas Food Corporation to restrict the groundnut area at Kongwa to 12,000 acres' instead of the 450,000 acres originally con templated constitute a scathing criticism of the Wakefield Commission on whose estimates and predictions the Govern- ment's grandiose and recklessly extravagant plans were based. The criticisms may be justified, though Mr. Wakefield and his colleagues have still to be heard from, but it was, after all, the Minister of Food, and indeed the Government as a whole, that was responsible for swallowing the Wakefield estimates whole and embarking precipitately on an enterprise that has proved so disastrously expensive and so all but completely unproductive. There is no great profit now in comparing the repeated apologias from the Treasury Bench with the repeated disclosures in this and other journals of what the situation in Kongwa really Was. It is enough to let history supply its own comment.
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