CAB129-37 — Page 116

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Page 116

CHAPTER 2

EVENTS BEFORE O.F.C. TOOK OVER THE GROUNDNUTS

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SCHEME

20. The Overseas Food Corporation only became responsible for the conduct of the Groundnuts Scheme on March 1, 1948. It was not concerned with the planning of the project nor with its development prior to that date; but since April 1, 1948, it has been responsible for its execution and for any modifications to it. When the Corporation took over responsibility for the day-to-day direction of the Scheme in East Africa, work had already been in progress there for over a year. A considerable amount of equipment had been acquired, a staff had been assembled, the sites for development had been selected and a programme of work put in hand. These initial operations have influenced subsequent decisions in many important aspects. It will, therefore, be useful to outline the history of the Scheme and to give some indication of the decisions and preliminary work which had already formed the basis upon which the Corporation had to develop its organisation to continue the task its constitution required it to assume.

World Food Shortage

21. The conception of the Scheme centred on one of the most serious difficulties with which the Government was faced at the end of the war- the shortage of fats and animal feeding stuffs. Domestic consumers in the United Kingdom were rationed at 7 ozs. per head per week, and manu- facturers of many important foods were severely hampered by the limit to their supplies. The situation was the more critical because this was not a shortage which time alone could be expected to remedy. There could be no question of waiting for the effects of war to disappear, and of returning then to the pre-war pattern of supply, for there were new factors to be taken into account. The world population had increased since 1939, and was still in- creasing rapidly; in particular, India, which exported an average of 518,000 tons of groundnuts a year between 1938 and 1945 to Europe, now wanted all she could grow to feed her own people. In 1946 she exported to the United Kingdom 120,000 tons and in the following year only 12,000 tons. Britain was importing 95 per cent. of the oils and fats (excluding butter) which she used each year, and it was estimated in 1946 that the country was short of what it needed by the equivalent of about one and a quarter million tons of groundnuts. Only some new source of supply could remedy this shortage, and it was not at all apparent where this new source of supply was to be found.

Mr. Samuel's Plan

22. These were the circumstances in which on March 28, 1946, Mr. Frank Samuel, Managing Director of the United Africa Company, presented to the Secretary of State for the Colonies and the Minister of Food his plan for increasing the production of fats. He had noticed the potentialities of vast tracts of unoccupied virgin land in East Africa, and he was convinced that,

by using modern mechanical, methods of land-clearing and tillage, it would

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