Groundnuts in the Dark
When the Minister of Food went off to East Africa to inspect the groundnuts scheme on the spot, there was a hope that he might bring back some new facts to buttress the high opinion of the possibilities of the scheme which he still holds. There was also a rather fainter hope that he would produce some more information about the bout of dismissals and resignations among the higher executive staff which, earlier this year, introduced a new clement of disturbance into the already very disturbed history of this project. What he actually reported to the House of Commons on Monday was that there had been a drought ; that yields of groundnuts and sunflower seed from the land so far sown would be very low ; that clearing of the land in two of the main areas—Kongwa and Urambo- is proceeding ; and that in the Southern Province, on which the highest hopes are now centred, some 2,000 acres (which, in a project on this scale, is not much) are to be cleared for planting this year. Nothing in this is new, and—to be quite fair to everyb,ody—none of the questions put to the Minister in Parliament did anything to expose the root of the matter. Everybody knows that the schema has been unfortunate so far. Everybody should know that the faith of the experts in its ultimate success is still unshaken. But nobody knows exactly how many of the stories of gross mismanagement on the spot are true and how many false, how much has been put right and how much is still going wrong. Mr. Strachey said that the men and women on the spot were determined to succeed. He did not say how much of the strain which has been put on that deter- mination was avoidable. But he did say that he was willing to make a longer statement. When he makes it, the general public may really learn something about the working of the groundnuts scheme. But they did not learn anything on Monday.
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