MILK AND SYMPATHY

A Cambridge geography graduate in search of solitude was recently found starving to death in a hikers’ bothy in the Scottish Highlands surrounded by KitKat wrappers. No one from the anti-globalisation lobby has yet blamed the manufacturer of KitKat bars, NestlZ, for causing her death, but perhaps that is just an oversight. NestlZ has been blamed for just about every world nutritional problem. Last week, the company was threatened with an international boycott of its products for daring to demand £3.7 million from the Ethiopian government, in compensation for assets seized by a Marxist government in 1975. ‘This is absurd,’ complained an Oxfam spokesman. ‘This is not about legal rights, it is about moral rights. When 11 million people face famine, exceptions should be made.’

In fact, NestlZ wants the money in order to invest it within Ethiopia, and the world’s most successful food company has a better chance of investing the money wisely than would any government, let alone the grasping, corrupt ones that have brought sub-Saharan Africa to its knees in recent decades.