Colonial malnutrition between the wars

The 1930s witnessed a growing interest in malnutrition among imperial scientists and officials, both in Britain and its colonies. In a context of mounting criticism of Britain's colonial record, nutrition emerged as the pivot of colonial “welfare” and was increasingly seen as requiring attention. Some of the most famous examples of this “discovery” of malnutrition in the interwar period included John Boyd Orr, then head of the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, who conducted a nutritional survey in Kenya; Robert McCarrison who developed nutritional research in colonial India; and Audrey Richards who studied nutrition in Northern Rhodesia from an anthropological perspective.Footnote ¹¹ These early forays into colonial nutrition were to take on a much broader ambit in the second half of the 1930s under the auspices of the Health Organization of the League of Nations, which in 1935 devised dietary requirements and initiated a range of nutritional studies.Footnote ¹² While the work of the League focused predominantly on Europe, it called for the development of knowledge on nutrition in colonial empires as well. In Britain, this call was answered by the Colonial Office, which in April 1936 asked colonial governors to report on nutrition in the territories they governed. A “Committee on Nutrition in the Colonial Empire” was created a few months later and released an important report in 1939.Footnote ¹³

In Britain, the problem of nutrition had achieved an increasingly high profile in the 1930s, in particular due to the pioneering work of John Boyd Orr who insisted upon a social reading of malnutrition and who also sat on the colonial nutrition committee. While interest in colonial malnutrition was initially more muted, it grew substantially in the second half of the 1930s. By the end of the decade, the problem was seen as even more critical in the colonies than in Britain or Europe, and as the overarching issue upon which the health and productivity of colonial populations depended. As Lord Hailey emphasized in his African Survey in 1938, “important as may be the influence of nutrition on health conditions in Europe, it does not exercise the same decisive effect on the factor of resistance as in Africa.”Footnote ¹⁴

Scientific discoveries during the interwar period had led malnutrition to be increasingly framed as a problem of specific deficiencies, whether of vitamins or minerals. The colonial nutrition committee, however, clearly did not favor this perspective, and the general view expressed in the report was that colonial nutritional problems were primarily caused by poverty and lack of food. While the report acknowledged the existence of specific deficiency diseases such as scurvy, pellagra, and beri-beri, it emphasized that the trees of clearly identifiable, specific deficiencies should not be mistaken for the forest of broader “deficiency states.” As the report noted, “for every recorded case of a specific deficiency disease there are hundreds of cases of absence of full health due in part at least to malnutrition.”Footnote ¹⁵ While the report used the term “malnutrition” rather than “undernutrition,” the problem was primarily understood as due to food scarcity rather than simple nutrient imbalance. In both the final report and the individual reports on each colony, while terms like “undernutrition” and “undernourished” were rarely used, “malnutrition” was described as both a quantitative and qualitative problem. The report thus argued that the role of vitamins in health and disease had probably been exaggerated in recent years. It quoted F. G. Hopkins who, despite being one of the “discoverers” of vitamins, emphasized that “after all, quantity still counts. We cannot live on vitamins alone!”Footnote ¹⁶

A related problem was the purported ignorance of consumers. In Britain, this was one of the key issues during the interwar period: were people malnourished because they were ignorant and made bad nutritional choices or simply because they were poor? The debate was by no means over by the late 1930s, and many explanations included a combination of the two, but overall the pendulum had swung towards the idea that the main reasons for malnutrition were poverty and lack of food.Footnote ¹⁷ Rationalizations of colonial malnutrition in the interwar period were not fundamentally different: native “ignorance” was often blamed but the predominant cause for malnutrition was “the low standard of living of many of [the empire's] inhabitants.”Footnote ¹⁸

This diagnosis meant that colonial authorities could not be entirely absolved from bearing part of the responsibility for malnutrition. The phenomenon was indeed widely acknowledged as having been made worse in recent years, in particular by the development of cash crops, which had undermined local populations’ capacity for self-subsistence, while leaving them at the mercy of heavy fluctuations in world commodity prices.Footnote ¹⁹ The main point, however, was clearly not to point the finger at colonialism or argue for colonial retrenchment—far from it. Indeed, framing malnutrition as a problem of poverty was a powerful tool to justify more ambitious policies of development. Malnutrition would be conquered not simply through nutritional education or targeted additions to colonial diets such as the provision of milk, but thanks to an ambitious policy of agricultural and economic development to reform colonial lives and landscapes.

At the League of Nations in 1935, former Australian Prime Minister Stanley Bruce, Australian economist F. L. McDougall, as well as colonial public health experts Etienne Burnet and W. R. Aykroyd famously called for a “marriage of health and agriculture” in order to implement ambitious agricultural policies that would benefit both farmers and consumers. At the rhetorical level at least, this approach was also that of colonial authorities in Britain in the late 1930s.Footnote ²⁰ In the face of growing criticism of the empire, malnutrition was decidedly a stain on Britain's imperial record. But it also provided a way out: the nutritional state of its colonial subjects was not simply a measurable index of the well-being of its populations; it was also an engine of development. It was hoped that agricultural development policies could raise the welfare of colonial populations while providing solutions to the whole Empire's economic problems through increased agricultural production.Footnote ²¹

Yet, while colonial malnutrition was increasingly talked and written about, how it should be remedied in practice was far from straightforward. There was consensus, however, about the need to acquire further knowledge and approach malnutrition from various disciplinary perspectives—biochemical, agronomic, and sociological. A first attempt at combining these different approaches to the problem was made in Nyasaland in 1938, with the attempt to develop an ambitious interdisciplinary nutritional survey of the colony.Footnote ²² The original impulse for the study had been provided by the anthropologist Audrey Richards in 1936. In 1938, however, the project was taken over by the Medical Research Council (MRC), and entrusted to B. S. Platt, a colonial doctor who had spent the previous six years in Shanghai studying malnutrition. Coming back from China in 1938, Platt had also played an important role in shaping the conclusions of the colonial nutrition committee, even though he was not formally part of it.Footnote ²³ The Nyasaland survey was planned as a pilot operation, which would help refine survey methods and suggest lines of development that could be replicated elsewhere in the Empire. The ambitious plans for the Nyasaland project, however, collapsed because of a shortage of personnel induced by the war and did not even produce a published report. Beyond the immediate context of the war, in fact, the failure of the Nyasaland survey exposed a much deeper issue: how exactly could the different disciplinary approaches be integrated, and what actual policies might be derived from such research? There was, indeed, never any real coordination between the biochemical and the social parts of the survey. The survey's anthropologist Margaret Read considered Platt's plans impractical, while Platt thought that the sociological aspects of diet were largely irrelevant to development work. The nutritional survey should have served as a portent: a doomed attempt at quickly enforcing agricultural intensification projects.Footnote ²⁴ Yet, while it did not provide any easy fix to the problem of colonial malnutrition, its failure did not mean that other ambitious plans for coupling nutrition and agricultural development work were dropped—quite the contrary. In fact, Platt emerged from the war as a leading authority on colonial malnutrition and moved to implement a new interdisciplinary program in The Gambia, advocating for a research and policy program in which health and agriculture were tightly associated.

Planning for postwar nutrition

While the resource requirements and shortage of personnel resulting from the war meant that colonial efforts to combat malnutrition were mostly put on hold, from 1943 onwards scientists were busy planning for an ambitious postwar policy. There were obvious differences in the various visions sketched at the time. Nevertheless, there was an overall consensus that malnutrition would be a critical issue in the postwar era. Addressing it was seen not only as a means of fending off accusations that imperial rule led to impoverishment, but also as a sound investment in the human and economic resources of the empire. There was broad agreement that dealing with malnutrition would require a much greater involvement of scientists coming from various disciplinary fields. With the help of increased metropolitan funding, these experts would have to implement ambitious schemes of development to enact sweeping changes in colonial agricultural and social structures. In short, colonial malnutrition was framed as a central problem of “native welfare” that required a broad, not purely medical, approach. As such, discussions about malnutrition served as an important backdrop against which the refurbished, welfare-oriented discourse of colonial development emerging in the early 1940s could be articulated.

During the Second World War, Britain experienced an unprecedented increase in state involvement in food-related matters. Experts and ministers extended government control over food production, ancillary industries, transportation, imports, processing, distribution, and rationing. This so-called “scientific food policy,” though often criticized and sometimes tragically harmful for the colonized, was largely regarded as a success in Britain, vindicating greater scientific and governmental intervention over food.Footnote ²⁵ This policy inspired Platt and other nutrition specialists to imagine a program that would achieve a more complete wedding of agricultural and nutrition policies in the colonies as well. These ambitions resonated with a more global call to end malnutrition and make food a top priority of postwar reconstruction. In May 1943, delegates gathered at Hot Springs, Virginia, to lay the foundations of international postwar food policy. During the conference, malnutrition was framed not merely as a question of education or of individual health, but as a very broad economic and agricultural problem.Footnote ²⁶ In Britain, the Hot Springs conference raised great hopes among nutrition specialists: as argued by Orr, who would become the first director of the FAO, this “epoch-making conference” made possible, at last, the emergence of a bold plan to end world hunger.Footnote ²⁷ There seemed to be a growing consensus that addressing malnutrition would require comprehensive and coordinated strategies to better integrate health and agriculture, and probably nowhere more so than in the British Empire. As Orr argued, “Britain must play a great part, probably the leading part in applying the recommendations [of the Conference] on a world-wide scale.” Since a “large proportion of the world's ill-nourished population” was to be found in its colonial empire, Britain had a duty to deal with the problem “in a way which will be an example to all nations holding rule over native populations.”Footnote ²⁸

There was a growing sense that malnutrition would be one of the defining challenges of postwar colonial reconstruction, and that Britain's ability to address the problem would be a key yardstick to assess its legitimacy as an imperial power. A 1944 report to the Fabian Colonial Bureau, chaired at the time by Arthur Creech-Jones, who would become colonial secretary between 1946 and 1950, argued that the problem of colonial malnutrition was of “fundamental importance.”Footnote ²⁹ In line with the perspective that had surfaced in the late 1930s, the authors of the report argued that while “native ignorance” and “prejudices” undoubtedly contributed to malnutrition, the core of the problem lay elsewhere. Deficiencies in colonial diets, the report argued, were primarily caused by disruptions brought about by the colonial presence. The main culprit identified here was the development of cash crops, at the expense of subsistence agriculture, which had led colonial populations to rely too much on imported maize or ultra-processed rice and flour. But righting imperial wrongs, they argued, would involve more, not less, intervention. Malnutrition had to be tackled as a broad social and agricultural problem, and not simply as a medical one. The report emphasized that while the use “of concentrated supplements,” such as yeast or vitamins, was justifiable to “meet immediate special needs,” these interventions were no more than a “short-term expedient.”Footnote ³⁰ What was of paramount importance was to create conditions that would make it easier for colonial populations to have access to a “good mixed diet,” through increased cultivation of food crops. Colonial “dietetic habits” would have to be entirely refurbished, and “prejudices” broken down, but the more important task was to “improve” and develop colonial agricultural systems.Footnote ³¹ Malnutrition could be conquered through a massive effort to develop colonial fisheries, to spread “modern” farming techniques, and to reorient local agriculture towards protein-heavy grains and increased animal production for milk, dairy, and meat.Footnote ³² This vision aligned closely with the refurbished vision of colonial development, as exemplified by the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act, which framed native welfare and economic development as mutually reinforcing.Footnote ³³ The attack on malnutrition would form the backbone of a new doctrine of trusteeship, where state and expert interventions would take center stage to promote economic development while shielding colonial subjects “from the supposed ravages of the market.”Footnote ³⁴

In typical Fabian fashion, the report called for a significant “expansion in the agricultural and veterinary services, at present far too limited” to implement this ambitious and multifaceted approach.Footnote ³⁵ While the Report praised the recent attention paid to colonial malnutrition, it lamented the scant practical actions that had been taken so far. In the final years of the war, there were, however, signs that the situation was improving, and the authors looked favorably upon the recent steps taken to coordinate scientific work on colonial malnutrition. There was, in fact, a lot of common ground between the Fabian expert-driven vision and that of Platt who, by the end of the war, was becoming a key figure in the institutionalization of colonial nutrition science. The Hot Springs conference, along with the relative success of the domestic food policy during the war, gave a strong impetus to the creation of new institutions to advance nutrition work across the empire. As part of these initiatives, Platt was appointed head of the new Human Nutrition Research Unit created by the MRC in February 1944, as well as of the newly created Department of Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

In this position, which put him in command of unprecedented resources and institutional authority, Platt kept arguing for an integrated approach to malnutrition. According to him, the core problem was rather straightforward: malnutrition was primarily due to a lack of food, and the solution was therefore “an increase of food production.”Footnote ³⁶ Most other metropolitan and colonial nutrition specialists concurred. Hugh S. Stannus, a specialist in tropical medicine who had also worked on the Ministry of Health's wartime nutritional surveys, contended that “the rapid growth of knowledge about what have been called accessory food factors” had tended to encourage “too narrow a view of the problem of nutrition.” “The march of the vitamins,” Stannus argued, had “been attended by many casualties, and many derelict ideas lie by the roadside.”Footnote ³⁷ While it was recognized that specific deficiencies did occur in some parts of the Empire, these deficiencies were often combined so that the main problem was the overall lack of food.Footnote ³⁸ During the winter of 1944–45, Platt made a two-month tour of the West Indies, his first visit to a colonial territory since Nyasaland. There he found a multiplicity of conditions associated with specific deficiencies of protein, calcium, or B vitamins. But he also determined, importantly, that these deficiencies were most often found in combination. As he saw it, it was very difficult to establish clear causal links between the shortage of a specific nutrient and a particular condition.Footnote ³⁹ Short-term measures could be implemented to alleviate some of the worst effects of specific deficiencies, but these could not be easily circumscribed as discrete pathologies and isolated from the broader problem of a shortage of food. So, while Platt came back from the West Indies arguing in favor of the distribution of skimmed milk powder and yeast among malnourished populations, he saw this only as a short-term palliative, to be complemented by a much more ambitious “long-term programme” aimed at overhauling colonial foodways and agricultural systems.Footnote ⁴⁰ Only through a “programme of increased production” could “optimal physiological efficiency” be secured. Nutrition could not, Platt adamantly claimed, be isolated from the wider agricultural and economic context in which it occurred: “a balanced diet must be worked out in relation to a balanced agriculture and in terms of a balanced trade.”Footnote ⁴¹

The ambitious vision for integrating health and agriculture was, if anything, reinforced during the war and Platt argued that combating malnutrition could only succeed by setting up a broad “combined operation.”Footnote ⁴² Although the Nyasaland experiment had offered a warning that interdisciplinarity often looked better on paper than in its actual implementation, this vision endured and was supported by a wide range of scientists.Footnote ⁴³ Others concurred with Platt that malnutrition was “not a question only of diet” but had endless social, agricultural, and ecological ramifications. Solving the problem would have to involve “the ethnologist, the economist, the agriculturalist, the parasitologist, the administrator and the educationalist, in addition to the biochemist.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Dietary surveys, for one, entailed many thorny issues, and meant that studies required detailed knowledge of the customs and social organization of the populations surveyed.Footnote ⁴⁵ And since the alleviation of malnutrition was seen as depending first and foremost on agricultural transformations, nutritional research could not be separated from work in agricultural research and development. At the other end of the development spectrum, it was argued, agriculturalists needed to take into account the work of nutritionists in order to articulate their development projects around the physiological needs of the local populations.

Interdisciplinary research was required because of the endless scientific ramifications of the problem, but also due to the depth and magnitude of the changes contemplated in colonial agricultural systems. A key concern of colonial authorities and scientists was to find ways to devise developmental formulas that could be accepted by local populations. This point was most forcefully mobilized by anthropologists who had been closely involved in nutritional investigations since the late 1920s. As Audrey Richards and Raymond Firth argued, the “schemes of development” advocated by nutrition scientists required the adoption of new technologies and would involve considerable disruptions in land tenure or labor regimes, and anthropologists were uniquely placed to facilitate the cooperation of colonial populations.Footnote ⁴⁶ Raymond Firth had, in fact, been a member of the Colonial Nutrition Research Committee before the war and, in 1945, went on a three-month trip to West Africa, arguing upon his return that the area's medical and social problems called for a great development of research, wedding biochemical, anthropological, and economic approaches.Footnote ⁴⁷ To be sure, this call was motivated by the desire of anthropologists to have a seat at the table of postwar imperial development.Footnote ⁴⁸ But this precisely underscores how malnutrition had become a focal issue onto which various disciplines could project their relevance in the immense task of imperial reconstruction after the war. Described as both a symptom and a cause for what was seen as economic backwardness, malnutrition provided support for the articulation of a new, more benevolent imperial vision, in which welfare and prosperity could be reconciled.Footnote ⁴⁹

A laboratory bench

For this ambitious program to be successfully implemented, there was a need for leadership and coordination. According to Platt, the priority was to gather data on colonial malnutrition in order to devise a set of practical solutions. He believed that this could be achieved through the survey of a small area or village, followed by experiments to improve agricultural productivity and standards of living, which could then be replicated throughout the Empire.Footnote ⁵⁰ In Platt's perspective, the problem—and potential solutions—were presented as broadly similar across colonies. Indeed, one of the advantages for metropolitan experts like Platt in framing malnutrition as primarily due to poverty, rather than focusing on specific deficiencies, was that it provided a universalizing framework, which was undoubtedly an advantage when applying for state funds. Like many other postwar development projects, the Gambian experiment was not an end in itself, but a means of devising a development formula that could then be applied elsewhere.Footnote ⁵¹

Following the rising wave of interest in colonial malnutrition, nutritionists and nutrition councils and committees had been appointed throughout the Empire in the late 1930s, but they were understaffed and their work was generally considered unsatisfactory.Footnote ⁵² While imperial and international organizations elevated the question of nutrition as a central aspect of the world's postwar reconstruction, on the ground, the initial spurt of enthusiasm was gradually subsiding and the Empire-wide campaign against malnutrition was plagued by discouragement and resignations. Many of these resignations were due to the fact that nutrition officers were almost all women, whose wages were heavily reduced when they got married and thus they often preferred to resign. But there was also a deeper underlying problem. Mrs Ellis, the nutrition officer for Nigeria, for instance, resigned because her “ardour had been damped,” by “failure to enlist interest and support” from the colony's government. There was also dissatisfaction with the lack of coordination from the metropolis. Many colonial nutritionists attempted nutritional surveys but received no clear directions as to how these ought to be conducted.Footnote ⁵³ It was felt that the creation of a central unit in London could provide nutrition officers with guidelines and coordinate efforts against malnutrition. This central unit would have to be associated to at least one colonial field research station. Work conducted there would build upon the lessons of the Nyasaland survey and promote interdisciplinary research, but shift the focus away from the surveying aspect towards the applied dimension. Having initially considered Trinidad for the location of this Field Working Party (FWP), Platt eventually settled on The Gambia, which he considered ideally suited to the task.Footnote ⁵⁴

The Gambia, a tiny colony populated by less than 300,000 people, had, as claimed by a former governor, suddenly “been brought into the limelight.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In January 1943, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on his way to the Casablanca conference, had paid a short visit to The Gambia and been deeply shocked by the poverty he had witnessed there. He mentioned the problem to Churchill when they met in Morocco and then repeatedly took the Gambian case as an example of what was wrong with European colonies in Africa.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Gambia had suddenly become the poster child of African poverty at a time when the legitimacy of the British Empire was increasingly under attack. As a Labour peer asked in the House of Lords, “why are such miserable medical conditions allowed to prevail” among the people of West Africa, who were, he reminded his audience, an “advertisement for the British Empire (and) shall stand as a justification of our right to be the heads of that Empire”?Footnote ⁵⁷ The colony, in fact, was seen as offering a small and amenable version of all the problems in tropical Africa. The Gambia's economy had been heavily transformed by the growth of groundnuts, a cash crop to which farmers devoted considerable land and labor resources. This made the country heavily dependent upon food imports and the population suffered from a variety of conditions associated with malnutrition.

Once an outpost of the slave trade, Bathurst (now Banjul), located at the Gambia River's mouth had been turned by the British into a trading post following abolition and the end of the Napoleonic wars. The economy of the region had been sharply transformed when groundnut cultivation was introduced along the Gambia River in the early 1830s. The presence of the river made it relatively easy to move groundnuts to the Atlantic, and cultivation increased rapidly: by the end of the nineteenth century, the country was exporting 30,000 tons of groundnuts each year.Footnote ⁵⁸ Groundnut exports kept on increasing in the twentieth century, and by the early 1930s, The Gambia was, despite its tiny dimensions, the sixth largest producer of groundnuts in the world. Following the Great Depression, the sharp drop in the price of agricultural commodities, and of oil crops in particular, was devastating for Gambian cultivators, and made it painfully clear how vulnerable they were to fluctuations in world prices.Footnote ⁵⁹

The Gambia's increasing reliance upon groundnuts compounded the colony's pressing food shortages in several ways. Land and labor were increasingly allocated to groundnut cultivation, to the detriment of food crops. The importance of the groundnut trade also meant that food consumption was poorer in quality, since the crops first sacrificed to groundnuts were millet and sorghum, leading to a less varied diet in which rice (both cultivated and imported) made for an ever-larger share of the population's fare. Food shortages were particularly acute during the “hungry season,” due to the very high seasonality of rain patterns, marked by a long dry season and a short wet one that lasted from June to mid-October, during which food reserves from the preceding year's harvest were almost exhausted. As many agricultural and nutritional experts argued, these food problems were avoidable and had been greatly compounded in recent years by the colony's increased integration in the world economy. For R. A. Webb, a member of the Department of Agriculture of The Gambia, the subsistence levels of the Gambian population had markedly declined since the early 1930s: “some twenty years ago some areas did not experience a hungry season, a feature which is now becoming more regular in its occurrence and of longer duration.”Footnote ⁶⁰

In July 1946, a pair of scientists visited The Gambia to assess its suitability as the future site for the contemplated FWP: Dr William Berry, a colonial medical officer who had been a member of the Nyasaland survey, and Hugh Bunting, a South African soil scientist who later became the chief scientific officer of the groundnuts scheme in Tanganyika. The two scientists, who represented respectively medical and agricultural expertise, were charged by the Colonial Medical Research Committee with examining various sites for the project's implementation.Footnote ⁶¹ They duly reported two months later and recommended that the FWP be set up in a small village called Genieri situated around 200 kilometers upstream on the south bank of the river Gambia. In Genieri, as in many other places bordering the river, groundnuts were cultivated on savannah soil in the uplands above the village and intercropped with millet, while rice was grown in seasonally flooded lowlands. Early millet and upland rice were grown and harvested in early August to shorten the hungry season, while late millet and swamp rice were harvested later and were supposed to feed the village until the next year's harvest. When rain began in late May, rice was planted in the uplands and transplanted a month later into the swamps. This period was thus marked by the highest intensity of labor, and thus of energy requirements, alongside the lowest amount of food available.Footnote ⁶²

While the problems encountered by Genieri and Gambian farmers were the product of a complex interplay between environmental, economic, and social factors, the local specificity of the situation was downplayed by Platt and the scheme's planners who claimed that the village typified the problems of colonial malnutrition in general. The particularly small size of the territory, the very strong seasonality of its rain regimes, and the extent to which it had become dominated by one cash-crop meant that The Gambia was often seen as the “tropics in miniature” and a particularly suitable laboratory for research into colonial problems.Footnote ⁶³ The relative political quiescence of the colony also made it an appealing site for a vast and ambitious agricultural and social experiment. If British scientists conceived of Africa as a “living laboratory,” then The Gambia was their laboratory bench, a purportedly controlled yet representative environment, which could provide insights into solving the world's nutrition problem.Footnote ⁶⁴ As R. A. Webb, a soil scientist in The Gambia's Department of Agriculture put it: “the present situation which confronts The Gambia is a replica in miniature of the situation confronting the whole world.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Platt, in particular, was in no doubt that the FWP was “more than a Gambian project,” and represented only the first step in a much wider endeavor. Genieri farmers were thus guinea pigs for an experiment with Empire-wide implications. This was how Platt presented the scheme to the Colonial Office, which bankrolled it with funds made available through the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act. As Platt argued, “the results of investigation made in this territory should lead to the improvement of the nutrition of Colonial peoples generally.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The Colonial Office, indeed, insisted that for the scheme to be funded, it had to provide replicable data: the FWP had “to lay a pattern which can be copied [..] throughout West Africa.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This was also how the project was presented to international organizations. At the 1948 FAO nutrition conference, “the work of the Field Working Party, though at present confined to a small area of a small territory in Africa,” it was claimed, “may show one of the possible ways by which the wealth and status of rural villages may be improved though improved nutrition, in other tropical areas.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In fact, initially the Gambian experiment followed to the letter the vision of the newly created FAO and Platt explicitly presented his plan as following “the lines laid down” at the founding FAO Conference, held in Quebec in October 1945.Footnote ⁶⁹ During this meeting, which Platt attended, and where John Boyd Orr was elected as the organization's director-general, it was indeed emphasized that the best method for tackling malnutrition was to choose small communities living “in typical areas” and to conduct “comprehensive surveys of health conditions and of natural resources.” This survey work should then be followed “by planned efforts” geared at “the intensive development of human and natural resources” in order to improve the standard of living of the selected communities. These “experimental areas” were then meant to provide both “training grounds” for nutrition specialists, as well as “working models” meant to be emulated elsewhere and implemented “on a wider scale.”Footnote ⁷⁰

A “human experiment”

The plan was not intended to be merely replicable; it was meant to be broad and ambitious as well. The health of Genieri's inhabitants, which stood as a metonym for the colonial nutrition problem, would be tackled by an integrated approach that extended beyond simple medical and agricultural interventions. For its proponents, the project represented a form of social engineering. As the plan unfolded, nutrition and even health increasingly appeared as a pretext for a much broader design—one focused not simply on improving health or boosting agricultural productivity, but on social and psychological objectives, leading the governor of The Gambia to describe the initiative as “a bold experiment in the technique of administration.”Footnote ⁷¹

The first visit paid by Berry and Bunting to The Gambia had convinced them that while specific nutritional deficiencies (rickets in particular) existed, these were “mild in character” and the key problem lay elsewhere. As they saw it, this was primarily one “of total fuel value,” and so Berry and Platt increasingly used the terms “under-nourishment” and “undernutrition” to distinguish this condition from “mal-nourishment.”Footnote ⁷² The solution called for an expansive approach, touching “on almost every aspect of community life.”Footnote ⁷³ The FWP was supposed to provide information on the natural resources of the country, methods of cultivation and food processing, the labor costs of various crops, and even broader questions such as the community's “capacity for change and development.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In order to implement this ambitious project, the plan was to hire a medical officer, an agronomist, a nutritionist, an animal husbandman, a food technologist, a costings assistant, an anthropologist, and numerous African assistants. These plans, however, had to be severely revised as the FWP was plagued by a wave of resignations, and in the end only three European officers remained in Genieri. But these difficulties lay ahead, and the initial plans for The Gambia's FWP were highly ambitious.

The diagnosis of insufficient food production and temporary labor shortages called for a wide development project to increase “the producing capacity of the peasant” through the introduction “of modern agricultural systems.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The FWP's initial aim was to introduce mechanization in the cultivation of rice in the river swamps. As seen before, the most important constraint identified by colonial administrators was the highly seasonal distribution of labor. The plan was therefore to use tractors during the first stages of land preparation, ploughing and planting to break the wet season labor bottleneck, so that villagers could have more time for hand weeding and rice cultivation. These plans for introducing tractors coalesced with a general enthusiasm for mechanization. Also involved in the inception of the Gambian project was A. J. Wakefield, who had been inspector general of agriculture in the West Indies when Platt had visited there. He was now in charge of planning the infamous Tanganyika groundnuts scheme, which would turn out to be a colossal failure of colonial development. Upon his return from Tanganyika, Wakefield participated in the first meetings devoted to the Gambian project and was adamant that this should be a “courageous experiment in mechanisation.” Not everyone shared his enthusiasm and some at the Colonial Office expressed concerns about the overly ambitious nature of the scheme, arguing that it was premature to set up a development plan before surveys and experimentations had even started. But these objections were overruled since the point was not simply to devise the best technical methods adapted to Genieri, but to develop general rules for the transformation of village communities throughout the empire. According to Platt and Wakefield, this required that the project “should be on a sufficiently extensive scale and sufficiently wide in scope to give adequate data and costings for application of the experimental work to a community.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Gradual and cautious approaches, it was felt, were incompatible with the need to create a project that could be put on display and would provide a replicable development formula.

The Gambian experiment, in fact, was no more a purely agricultural project than it was a purely medical one. Berry, who became responsible for the implementation of the plan on the ground, argued that “it should be made clear from the start that though we work under the name of Nutrition, that is in a sense a pretext for a fuller field of activity.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Reviewing the first few months of the project, he explained that “our problem is not the technical one of working out the best machines and fertilisers, etc., to use.” Both Platt and Berry saw the FWP “as a social rather than agricultural or nutritional experiment.” The most important point of the project was to draw lessons on how modern agricultural techniques could be best grafted onto a village community, and study how far, and through which methods, it was possible to “[modernize] the African and his society so as to fit him into Modern farming:” The Gambian project was not “an agricultural demonstration plot,” but “a human experiment.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Edward Mellanby, secretary of the MRC (which also supervised the plan), described the project as a “big social experiment.”Footnote ⁷⁹ “Every activity of village life,” it was hoped, would be experimented upon “with the aim of producing an improved, if not model village society, a model which could, with modification, be applied elsewhere in Africa.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Undernutrition was thus conceived of as a total social problem and, as such, was said to require a deep form of social engineering to create new colonial subjects and communities.

While, as seen before, nutritional problems had often been blamed on the paramount importance of cash crops, Platt and Berry were concerned with another issue that they deemed even more important: “the apathy of the rural African.”Footnote ⁸¹ Berry expanded on this point in a note that combined a superficial rebuke of the British imperial record with heavily racist stereotypes. Before colonial conquest, he explained, the “primitive people” of Africa had been periodically forced by famine and war to overcome their natural “apathy,” but colonial paternalism had allegedly put an end to this. He seemed to lament the fact that as wars had been eradicated thanks to the British presence, and as the management of famines and epidemics was now the responsibility of the colonial conqueror, “we have as it were taken a race which used to live in a world of black-and-white stimuli and put it in a world of varying tones of grey.” According to Berry, vitamins and even tractors could only go some way towards solving the problem; what was truly needed was to “plant the barb of ambition under each man's skin.”Footnote ⁸² The ultimate aim of the experiment, then, was not simply to identify specific nutritional problems or experiment with a particular agricultural technique. It was also to throw light upon the question of the “effective incentives for this type of community.”Footnote ⁸³ Berry explained that to overcome the alleged “native apathy,” it would be necessary to “tickle the native fancy” by making available new consumer goods to instill a “lust for money” and encourage African populations to “work harder.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The aim of this experiment, then, was not so much to provide vitamins or even to develop the land but to guide and accelerate “village evolution.”Footnote ⁸⁵

This vision was central to the much broader goals of development, which in the period after the Second World War expanded far beyond the original Chamberlainite focus on “developing the estates,” and meant that the object of development was no longer simply the colonial landscapes but the colonized themselves. The point of “development” was to “develop the African.”Footnote ⁸⁶ As several scholars have shown, nutrition science played an important role in this process of making colonized subjects into “developmental subjects.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Development thus necessitated technocratic forms of “calculability” so as to assess progress.Footnote ⁸⁸ Nutrition science was one powerful and seemingly scientific way of making the bodies of developmental subjects legible and computable. In Genieri, the villagers were thus regularly weighed, their consumption of food broken down into so many nutritional categories, and their physical activity closely monitored to compute the energy expenditure involved in various agricultural and domestic tasks.Footnote ⁸⁹

The health of the villagers thus shifted from being an end in itself to becoming a measurable index of development. It quickly became obvious, in fact, that the health of the villagers was not itself a priority for the FWP. In the first year, a dispensary was created in Genieri, but it was not viewed as an element to improve the general health of the population. Rather, it was seen as a “way in” to gain “the confidence of the people.” Once this confidence had been won, the dispensary closed in 1949.Footnote ⁹⁰ The health benefits derived by the villagers from the presence of the FWP were, in fact, far from straightforward. Surveys conducted in Genieri showed that the majority of villagers gained weight following the onset of the experiment, thanks to the distribution of rice to the villagers working on the FWP's sites. This was not without drawbacks, however. The extra rice made available to the villagers meant that the share of millet and sorghum, sources of B vitamins, declined at the expense of highly milled imported rice, which was more filling but also poorer in vitamins. The medical surveys conducted in the village made it plain that, while the inhabitants were, on the whole, gaining weight, there were also increasing signs, throughout the village, of symptoms of vitamin B deficiencies.Footnote ⁹¹

Things fall apart

Not only did maintaining the health of the villagers tend to fall by the wayside, but even the project's goal of producing more food tended to recede. Indeed, the nutritional dimension of the project increasingly appeared as a pretext for technical, agricultural, and economic development. The initial project had been predicated on the introduction of mechanization to boost the production of rice. Tractors were borrowed from a nearby experimental station, and various trials of crops and fertilizers started in early 1947. These schemes encountered significant difficulties from the outset, the most important of which was that tractors proved to be totally impractical in the swamps. After only one season of experimenting with rice, Berry and Platt decided in August 1947 to switch the emphasis from the production of rice for local consumption to that of groundnuts for export.Footnote ⁹² This shift represented an abrupt and complete turnabout on the discourse on colonial nutrition, which had been dominated over the past ten years by the importance of redressing the balance between cash crops and food crops.

An important factor in this decision was related to timing, and the need to come up with quick results for display and replication. The initial seed fund was only for a three year period, which meant that there was no time to waste: Platt and Berry needed the large-scale mechanization project to work immediately. The grandiose claims made about the project, touted as a way to cure malnutrition throughout the Empire, also meant that it started to attract nutrition specialists from other colonies. The FWP quickly faced “a great deal of pressure.”Footnote ⁹³ Since the initial rice scheme was deemed too complicated to produce immediate and visible results that could be displayed to the colonial medical establishment, to the British government, and to international organizations it was dropped only a few months after its inception.

Another factor for the switch from rice to groundnuts was related to gendered labor regimes in the region. Rice growing in Genieri and throughout The Gambia was a task overwhelmingly performed by women. This was largely the result of the introduction of groundnuts, which had created a pattern of spatial segregation and a strongly gendered division of labor.Footnote ⁹⁴ By the mid-twentieth century, the uplands were overwhelmingly farmed by men, who cultivated groundnuts there, intercropped with millet and sorghum. Rice cultivation in the lowlands, on the other hand, was a task performed almost entirely by women. Yet agricultural officers in The Gambia lamented the fact that “women are more conservative than men and less accessible to ideas put forward by a male European officer.” “More individualistic” women “interesting themselves only in their own or their family's patch of ground” were thus not deemed the best targets for agricultural development. Since village cooperation was judged an essential feature of the project, it was felt that men would be more easily swayed by mechanized agricultural development.Footnote ⁹⁵

The sharp rise in the price of groundnuts also made the switch from rice to groundnuts appear as a more lucrative venture at a time when Britain was beset with problems of rationing and food shortages, and facing a severe currency crisis. The reorientation of the Gambian scheme was in fact part of a broader shift in development policy, which placed renewed emphasis on developing colonial exports to meet the nation's food and dollar shortages.Footnote ⁹⁶ The change of plans occurred almost at the same time as the decision by the newly established Colonial Development Corporation to set up its ill-fated poultry farm in The Gambia. Launched in early 1948, the plan aimed to create a large-scale poultry farm from scratch, producing 20 million eggs and 1,000,000 pounds of chicken annually. These products were meant almost entirely for export to Britain, in an attempt to provide cheap eggs and chicken to British consumers, while addressing poultry feed shortages.Footnote ⁹⁷ Although the poultry farm was not directly related to Platt's scheme, these projects and reorientations were part of a broader inflection in development policy and discourse, in which the economies of Britain and its African colonies were increasingly presented, as Chancellor of Exchequer Stafford Cripps put it in November 1947, as so “closely interlocked” as to form a single economic bloc. This meant, according to Cripps, that Africa represented “a great potential for new strength and vigour” for the British and Western European economies, but also that African colonies would automatically benefit from revived British prosperity.Footnote ⁹⁸ In practice, this often meant prioritizing British needs over colonial ones, but the switch could at least be dressed up as a win-win situation.Footnote ⁹⁹

Despite the switch from rice to groundnuts, the FWP's leaders clung to the claim that their project was primarily driven by the interests and welfare of Genieri villagers. Berry and Platt maintained that the scheme's new orientation did not fundamentally alter the nature of their experiment, since it would still contribute to The Gambia's economic development and to instilling a sense of entrepreneurship among local farmers. Gambian villagers might not be able to produce more rice, but they would have more cash to pay for extra food and access to healthcare and social services.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ While discourse on colonial malnutrition, before and during the war, had emphasized the drawbacks of dependence on cash crops, it had never, in fact, been Platt's ambition to promote a decrease in groundnuts, but simply to redress the balance by developing the production of food crops. Criticisms of cash crops had been toned down in the scheme's leaders rhetoric and partly replaced by an emphasis on the purported failings of African peasants. The psychological and social objectives of the scheme were becoming increasingly central, and they could accommodate the swift policy reversal rather easily. The project was so broad and amorphous that it was flexible enough to accommodate reversals in strategies without appearing unduly contradictory. Since malnutrition was believed to be primarily due to poverty, any measure seen as contributing to raising the villagers’ income was viewed as a way to cure the disease. Framing malnutrition as a problem of poverty and lack of food could lead to a condemnation of cash crops and integration into world trade. But it turned out that in a different context, marked by food shortages in Britain and rising commodity prices abroad, it could equally be used to legitimize going all-in for this.

This rhetorical gymnastics could not, however, conceal the mounting difficulties encountered by the FWP on the ground. For one, data collection on the diet and activities of the villagers, was beset with inconsistencies, omissions and errors. Margaret Grant, Platt's research assistant in London, lamented that most of the nutrition data collected was “not worth the paper they were written on.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ More broadly, it gradually dawned upon the team's members and coordinating institutions that the interdisciplinary program had probably been overly ambitious. Since the whole operation was set up as a social experiment, rather than a technical or medical one, the original plan was to have a sociologist and an economist as full members of the team. The aim of appointing a sociologist was not to study the traditions and customs of the village but rather to help assuage concerns about its “unpredictable future” and to mitigate any negative “reactions to ‘newfangled’ methods and gear.”Footnote ¹⁰² In April 1948, Kenneth Little, a student of Raymond Firth at the London School of Economics, visited Genieri to advise on how sociology could be included in the activities of the FWP, but he was rather dubious. Genieri, he argued, could not be a considered a “social laboratory” because of the intensive nature of the experiment, which interfered greatly with the “‘normal’ processes of village life.” The experiment, he thought, was probably of use for “technical” but not for “sociological purposes,” and argued that the aims of the FWP clearly needed some clarifying. In the end, no sociologist was appointed to work in Genieri.Footnote ¹⁰³

Even at the technical and agricultural level, ambitions were quickly scaled down. Berry's project, in August 1947, was to cultivate 600 acres of groundnuts, but when Wakefield visited the village a few months later, he strongly advised against such an unrealistic plan.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Yet, even with a reduced acreage, the plan was a disastrous failure. The use of tractors proved to be entirely unprofitable, as yields were disappointing and the benefits were vastly outweighed by the costs of mechanization.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Experiments with fertilizers were no more heartening, and trials showed that 80 percent of the chemicals applied were almost entirely leached away. The end result was that the groundnuts grown by traditional methods produced higher yields than those farmed using tractors and fertilizers.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Faced with these difficulties, the members of the FWP were “uneasy,” and the mood among the team became acrimonious. Personal animosities soon became acute, in particular between Berry and the agricultural officer, Margaret Haswell. The problems were not merely personal, however, and revolved around the nature of the project. While Platt argued that it should continue and be accompanied by a precise economic assessment of costs and profits, Berry expressed doubts about the benefits of persisting with large-scale mechanization. In his own account, as well as in the collection of archival documents assembled by his wife Veronica, Berry is cast as the voice of caution arguing for gradual experimentation against Platt's grandiose and unrealistic schemes.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Berry indeed thought that the experiment should proceed gradually so as not to break “down the structure of native society.” Yet he was not opposed to groundnuts cultivation, nor to the introduction of mechanization. In fact, he strongly supported both, and his motivation to engineer new colonial subjects was no less ambitious. His warnings may in fact be interpreted as representing a defense of what had been the original aim of the project, which he had planned as a human experiment and which he saw as being threatened by the will to transform the scheme into a mere technological and economic experiment. Platt eventually decided to let Berry go, which also led the FWP's nutritionist, Miss Richardson, to resign in solidarity. Beyond the personal animosities, the disagreements between the various members of the project exposed the contradictions of the overly ambitious scheme, which led to its rapid collapse.

Unravelling and aftermath

The European side of the team was by then composed of only three members and the Colonial Office started to express its deep dissatisfaction with the whole scheme. They were no longer sure that the scheme was worth the “large sum of Colonial Development and Welfare money sunk in this enterprise.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Berry's departure did not, in fact, solve any problem. The main issue was whether the orientation of the scheme ought to be decided in Genieri, Bathurst, or London. A Committee of Management was appointed in London in June 1949 but, if anything, it made matters worse: “remote control from London” was indeed proving more and more “unsatisfactory” and “impracticable.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The larger problem was the unclear nature of what the experiment was really attempting to do: “the real concept of what we want to do,” The Gambia's governor argued, “has been lost in a mass of suggestion and counter-suggestions, many of them valuable, which have successfully fogged the issue.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Haswell complained of the lack of “control and support from above,” and she and the team's technician also resigned in early 1950.Footnote ¹¹¹ By then, the project was widely viewed to be at an “unhappy impasse”: agricultural results were disappointing, the original aim of improving nutrition through increased supplies of home-grown grains had been dropped, the problem of the hungry season had not been solved, and signs of malnutrition were in fact on the rise.Footnote ¹¹²

It probably did not help that the failings of the scheme were being laid bare at the same time as those of the Tanganyika Groundnuts Scheme and the Gambia Poultry Farm, which was beset with problems, including the inability to grow enough foodstuffs and an outbreak of typhoid fever. While the poultry farm and the FWP were largely unrelated, the former in particular drew fierce criticisms from the Conservatives and in the press, and was used for a broader indictment of the Labour government's “Socialist empire-building.”Footnote ¹¹³

In light of the rather dismal results of the FWP, the idea of a project wedding research and development, nutrition and agriculture was quickly dropped. A visiting party composed of representatives of the Colonial Office, the LSHTM, and the Colonial Medical Research Council was sent to Genieri in September 1950 to assess the situation. They advocated that attempts to introduce fertilizers and mechanical implements should be “kept to a minimum” and introduced very gradually. More importantly, they argued that the overly expansive objectives assigned to the scheme should be abandoned and that the project should be geared towards agricultural development rather than nutrition research.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In the end, the FWP was terminated in late 1950, and its infrastructure handed over to The Gambia's administration, who maintained it as a purely agricultural operation until the late 1950s. Any hopes of broad social engineering or that the scheme could yield “results of practical application elsewhere” these were no longer considered realistic.Footnote ¹¹⁵

In some ways, however, Genieri did not cease to be a microcosm for wider (post)-colonial problems. Margaret Haswell, who resigned from the FWP in 1950, nonetheless returned to the village at regular intervals to pursue her investigations of the impact of agricultural modernization upon the health of the villagers. Having joined the Oxford Agricultural Economics Research Institute, where she pioneered new approaches to development economics, she returned to Genieri in 1962, 1973, and 1979 to conduct surveys in the village.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In the early 1960s, the picture she drew was mixed but somewhat encouraging, as agricultural productivity had increased since the 1950s. This was not because of tractors or fertilizer use, which had been abandoned, but because of small causeways built to facilitate access to the swamps, leading to a fairly large increase in swamp rice cultivation.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Infant mortality, however, remained very high, and the food problems faced by Genieri's farmers had not abated. While villagers benefited, on average, from increased sources of income, these were in fact very unevenly distributed and food production per head had actually declined since the early 1950s. Increased groundnut cultivation meant that less food (millets in particular) was grown, and farmers were even less insulated than before from fluctuations in world prices. As groundnut prices dropped in the 1950s, cultivators were caught in a vicious circle of indebtedness, as much of the food imported was bought on credit. Reviewing the situation in 1963, two years before The Gambia's independence, Haswell also warned of the ill-effects resulting from the “social breakdown” of compounds into nuclear families, which led to labor shortages. By the mid-1970s, she was even more critical of the situation in the village, where life was marked by rising inequalities and spiraling indebtedness. Haswell argued that the various colonial and postcolonial projects to intensify farming in Genieri and entrench it more deeply within the global economy had left the poorer villagers with “crippling” amounts of debt, had thrown even greater burdens upon women who were by then almost solely responsible for food production, while the health and educational benefits were negligible at best.Footnote ¹¹⁸ She would keep returning to this example as a striking illustration of the effects of the “misguided growth path” advocated by “neo-development planners and their pre-cast programmes,” which “enslaved” farmers “in a perpetual round of debt.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Her village studies illustrated the need for a development economics founded upon a longitudinal, multifactorial, and “holistic” analysis of rural change.Footnote ¹²⁰ Genieri thus persisted as a “microcosm” and a symbol of the effects of postwar modernization programs, although not, one suspects, in the way Platt had hoped.

As he saw the Gambian experiment unravel, Platt complained that he had “been taken to task for concerning myself with agricultural matters” but he remained rather unrepentant about “the importance of the need for a combined effort on the part of all concerned with the many aspects of welfare and development.”Footnote ¹²¹ Despite the dismal failure of the FWP, he was not entirely finished with The Gambia, although he retreated to the somewhat safer ground of medicine. After organizing the two conferences in 1952, Platt managed to secure funding for an MRC laboratory in Fajara, which remains to this day a leading center in tropical medicine, but one focused primarily on research rather than on applied development.Footnote ¹²² He also continued to head the MRC's Human Nutrition Research Unit until the late 1960s, but tended to focus on experimental science, rather than attempting to fuse nutrition research and agricultural development. Like most scientists in the field, he came to focus on infant malnutrition and the question of Kwashiorkor in particular, experimentally observing the impacts of what he preferred to call “protein-calorie deficiency” on animals and patients.Footnote ¹²³

The pivot of Platt and others towards a more strictly medical framework, while organizations such as the FAO adopted a more technical approach to agricultural development, may be seen as an attempt to return to a simpler approach after the overly expansive one taken during and immediately after the Second World War had clearly reached an impasse.Footnote ¹²⁴ The interdisciplinary character of Platt's Gambian project was, in the end, an administrative nightmare. Its overly ambitious nature also meant that at some point what the experiment was really attempting to do became unclear. More importantly, Platt's attempt to devise ready-made one-size-fits-all solutions to solve malnutrition throughout the empire led him to neglect the local specificities (social, agricultural, and ecological) of the community and landscape he was trying to “improve.”

Yet, the failure of this particular project should not lead us to discard the significance of this event and, more broadly, of postwar discourse linking malnutrition and imperial development. Nutrition scientists like Platt explicitly argued against the “medicalization” of hunger in order to put forward an ambitious program to thoroughly reform colonial landscapes and subjects. As the case of The Gambia shows, not only did the aim to remake colonial foodways continue after the Second World War, it became more ambitious. Reforming food cultures was no longer simply an aim; it became a means to create new landscapes and subjects altogether. As the reorientation of the project from rice to groundnuts illustrates, this vision also led to a neglect of the root causes of malnutrition. This was not because the connections between malnutrition, poverty, and the legacy of colonialism were ignored or papered over. On the contrary, Platt's approach rested on the belief that addressing malnutrition required a vast project to engineer new colonial subjects to purportedly improve their “living standards,” even if this might increase their dependence upon cash crops and, in the end, further undermine their food security.