On 23 October 1950, Sir Eric Coates presented the OFC's eagerly awaited Revised Long Term Plan for the scheme. But even this could not satisfy the new Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskill, and by January 1951 the Cabinet had decided effectively to close the scheme and write off the loss. A fig leaf remained, but withered swiftly in the tropical sun.

The Long Term Plan

The Plan aimed, over a seven-year period, to create a viable Corporation within the financial limits set by the ORD Act. It admitted that this could only be done through a further drastic reduction in the scheme's scope and objectives, and without meeting the ORD's obligation to repay the money so far advanced by the Government. Almost as a revelation, it noted that ‘the groundnut is not a plant which lends itself readily to mass methods over vast acreages’, and that purely ‘mechanical clearing can be done, but it cannot be done at an economic cost’. It therefore adopted the Kongwa Working Party's conclusions, stopping production on the bulk of the area, to be turned over to ranching, and focussing on experimental farming in the small fertile area. There would be no further expansion at Urambo, though the existing cleared area would continue to be cultivated with a variety of crops to see which were most suitable. But, in the south, they proposed to continue clearing, by hand as well as machine, and to expand production. They admitted that the scale of production proposed a year before was no longer capable of fulfilment within the budget limits, but proposed clearing 105,000 acres by 1957, with the possibility of 45,000 more thereafter.

One reason for this continued optimism about the prospects for the Southern Province was the engagement – at last – of both the Tanganyika Administration and the Colonial Office. The colonial authorities had finally begun to focus on the territory's Cinderella province and drawn up an ambitious development plan for the south, predicated on a central role for the scheme at Nachingwea, the railway line and the deep-water harbour at Mtwara. The last was still under construction, but forecasts of potential crop exports by peasant producers in the Southern Province Development Plan suggested that there would be enough trade to justify completing it, even with a smaller output from the scheme itself.