The East African Groundnut Scheme: Lessons of a Large-Scale Agricultural Failure

There is a long history of very large-scale agricultural projects under government auspices, from the Soviet sovkhozy of the 1930s to the large Zambian and Senegalese schemes of 1981.1 If only the problem of food supply could be solved by large applications of capital to vast acreage of land; if only capital could overcome any obstacle, then the world hunger problem might be alleviated with extraordinary rapidity.2 Africa has presented many examples of such projects, showing what now appears an extraordinarily naive faith that mechanical cultivation of unoccupied land...would lead to large increases in production. These ranged across the continent from Richard Toll in Senegal and the Office du Niger in Mali, neither very successful,3 to the initially well-managed but now problematic Gezira Scheme in the Sudan, the failures at Mokwa in Nigeria, Gonja in the Gold Coast, Zande in Sudan, Kigumba and South Busoga in Uganda, Yagoua in Cameroon, and various others.4 Somewhere in the collective memory of all food and agricultural scholars there lies some recollection, however hazy, of the the largest of all the projects, the ill-conceived, ill-managed, and unlucky East African Groundnut (Peanut) Scheme.5 Forbes Munro has said that the facts surrounding the scheme are perhaps too well-known to bear repetition, but the scarcity of economic analysis concerning it and the elderly nature of much of the writing both contradict his claim.6 It was in its way very up-to-date: a collectivist, concerted effort to respond to an immediate food shortage with quick results. Groundnuts are an annual crop that could provide both high calorie and high protein content in a final commodity that produces much of its own fertilizer (as a legume, the nuts add nitrogen to the soil by atmospheric fixation).7 It was also truly vast. Its 5,000 square miles (3,210,000 acres, equal to Yorkshire or Connecticut) were to include 30,000acre individual fields, the largest, insofar as the authors have been able to determine, ever to be put under cultivation. It contained certainly the largest force of heavy tractors ever