140 Poverty and Hunger
amount of money already sunk in a project is a relevant consideration. Attitudes
and ideas are sufficiently confused and contradictory for irrational elements to
have free play. It is extremely difficult, for example, to see the large quantities of
fine onions grown on the Perkerra Scheme in Kenya, and to compare the green irri-
gated fields with the surrounding desert, and at the same time to sustain a conviction
that the scheme should be abandoned. Running water through channels and onto
dry land, growing abundant crops where there was only bare soil and barren bush
before, and enabling people to enjoy a level of prosperity they have never previously
known, appear inherently and incontrovertibly good. It is Isaiah’s vision:
The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice,
and blossom as the rose (The Bible).To suggest closure seems ignoble and destructive, an affront to the aspirations and
achievements of the human spirit. If a neutral visitor can have this feeling, it may
be expected all the more in those whose lives and work are bound up in a scheme.
Yet the power of this emotion multiplies the risks of starting projects of this sort
through making it exceptionally difficult to close them down however uneconomic
they may prove.
There is, indeed, a strain of Utopianism in most complex settlement schemes.
Often there is an idealized view of the human situation that settlement will create.
In colonial times this was often the stabilized African, fixed and controlled on a
piece of land. Since independence, it has varied: in West Africa it has been an
urban farmer; in Kenya, a sturdy yeoman; in Tanzania, a cooperative worker.
Another Utopian aspect is the frequency with which stresses and breakdowns are
not anticipated: as Apthorpe (1966, p23) has pointed out, provision is often lack-
ing either for failure of the social system or for mechanical repairs. Again, it is very
common for the targets for land preparation, settlement, production and with-
drawal to be wildly optimistic and for achievements to fall far short of them. These
features are partly explicable in terms of the self-delusion of men who are trans-
ported by a vision. When an ideal is pursued by a whole community, as in some
communal economy schemes, it may make a scheme feasible through the sacrifices
the participants are prepared to accept; but when the vision is only in the mind of
the initiator, as it has been with most complex settlement schemes, the effects are
often a sequence of unrealistic estimates, uneconomic measures and personal com-
mitments which comprise part of the risks of the project.
Resisting temptation^7
Since all these disadvantages have applied in the past they can be expected to con-
tinue to apply in the future, and should be taken into account in assessing propos-
als for settlement schemes and similar agricultural projects. It is not enough to
carry out evaluations^8 which consider only those economic factors which can be
quantified; it is necessary also to include administrative factors and the probable
motivations and behaviour of the actors involved. Allowance has to be made, for