GREAT BRITAIN: Groundnuts on the Rocks

NUTS; THE GREAT FIASCO, cried a rude Daily Mail banner headline. It referred to the Labor government’s grandiose, three-year-old project of planting a vast acreage of groundnuts (peanuts) in the bush wastes of Tanganyika, East Africa. The nuts were supposed to yield margarine and add extra calories to Britain’s meager diet. Last week, Labor bigwigs were reading the first summary of the project’s progress by the Overseas Food Corp., which the government created to run the groundnut scheme. It was a most embarrassing report.

The original starry-eyed estimates by government experts had called for a total clearance of 3,210,000 acres of jungle by 1952, at an estimated cost of £23,975,000 ($67,130,000). Production targets were set at 56,920 tons for 1948, and 277,676 tons for 1949. The £23 million was spent, all right, but the return added up to peanuts. Only 49,620 acres were planted, which yielded a miserable 2,150 tons of groundnuts and 800 tons of sunflower seeds (planted in rotation with the nuts).

The government corporation had plenty of excuses. First there were heavy rains, then a severe drought. The bush in the Kongwa district had “proved unduly obstinate”; it took eight hours to clear one acre instead of the estimated two. Kongwa soil hardens until it becomes “like a tennis court.” Tractors had been mishandled by native labor. Even African animals turned saboteurs. Wild pigs made a goober feast of one experimental farm, and telephone lines were constantly broken by mild but shortsighted giraffes who got entangled in the wires.

What shocked Britons most was a statement from the accountants—Cooper Brothers & Co.—that they were “unable to report that in our opinion proper books of accounts have been kept by the corporation.” But Sir Leslie Arthur (“Dick”) Plummer, the corporation’s chairman and Labor’s vice president in charge of groundnuts, also had some excuse for this. In the first year (1947-48), the scheme had been run by a subsidiary of the empire-wide business colossus, Unilever. Plummer claimed that when his corporation took over a year ago, the books were already in chaos. This did not satisfy one Tory M.P., who exploded: “Damned if any shareholders but the British public would stand for any business of theirs being run this way!” Conservatives were happily whetting their knives for a parliamentary debate on the East African flop later this month.

But it looked as though Labor would stick stubbornly to the scheme. At his country house in Essex, where he farms and bird-watches, Plummer was still hopeful of getting the scheme straightened out. Said he: “We’d be pretty damn fools if we had to present another financial report like this next year!” Subordinating his distaste for Labor planning to his fervent support of empire development, Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express had a Churchillian message of cheer to Plummer: “The whole harsh picture is a stimulus to resolution and skill, an appeal to the nation’s grit.”