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Not just Nestle Milking the Third World
Letter to the Guardian, December 20, 2002
By Ashok Sinha and Romilly Greenhill
It is a sad fact that Nestle (Nestle claims £3.7m from famine-hit Ethiopia, December 19) is not the only company pursuing aggressive legal action to recover old debts. At least two other British companies - Iceland (now the Big Food Group), and J&S Franklin - are trying to recover debts from desperately poor countries. Iceland is suing Guyana for £12m, plus full costs and expenses, for a debt contracted in 1976, while Franklin is trying to extract resources from Sierra Leone - a war-torn country with the lowest human development in the world. In all three cases a poverty-stricken country, which has qualified for debt relief from the international community, is being pursued for large debt repayments that would be better spent locally on saving lives and eradicating poverty.
The governments and multilateral institutions of the wealthy world have agreed that burden-sharing must be a guiding principle of debt relief. And poor countries desperately need the funds saved through debt relief to invest in economic recovery. UK taxpayers are prepared to shoulder the burden of writing-off debts and providing a "fresh start" to the world's poor. But their efforts look set to be undermined by greedy companies more interested in making a quick buck than in saving the lives of millions of people.
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