USAID food for nearly 30,000 hungry kids to be destroyed: Official
A senior US official on Wednesday said nearly 500 tonnes of high-energy biscuits, to be used as emergency food for malnourished young children, expired this month while sitting in a warehouse in Dubai.
Under questioning by lawmakers, Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary of state in charge of management, tied the decision to the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which closed its doors on July 1.
'I think that this was just a casualty of the shutdown of USAID,' Rigas said, adding that he was 'distressed' that the food went to waste.
Aid officials managed to save 622 tonnes of the energy-dense biscuits in June – sending them to Syria, Bangladesh and Myanmar – but 496 tonnes, worth $793,000 before they expired this month, will be destroyed, according to two internal USAID memos reviewed by Reuters, dated May 5 and May 19, and four sources familiar with the matter.
The wasted biscuits will be sent to landfills or incinerated in the United Arab Emirates, two sources said. That will cost the US government an additional $100,000, according to the May 5 memo verified by three sources familiar with the matter.
Trump has said the US pays disproportionately for foreign aid, and he wants other countries to shoulder more of the burden. His administration announced plans to shut down USAID in January, leaving more than 60,000 tonnes of food aid stuck in stores around the world, Reuters reported in May.
The food aid stuck in Dubai was fortified wheat biscuits, which are calorie-rich and typically deployed in crisis conditions where people lack cooking facilities, 'providing immediate nutrition for a child or adult', according to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).
Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat, said lawmakers had specifically raised the issue of the food with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in March. In May, he promised lawmakers that no food aid would be wasted.
'A government that is put on notice – here are resources that will save 27,000 starving kids, can you please distribute them or give them to someone who can?
'Who decides, no, we would rather keep the warehouse locked, let the food expire, and then burn it?'
Rigas said that the US remained the world's largest donor, and he promised to learn further details about the biscuits.
'I do want to find out what happened here and get to the ground truth,' he said.
The US is the world's largest humanitarian aid donor, amounting to at least 38 percent of all contributions recorded by the UN. It disbursed $61bn in foreign assistance last year, just over half of it via USAID, according to government data.
The Trump administration notified Congress in March that USAID would fire almost all of its staff in two rounds on July 1 and September 2, as it prepared to shut down. In a statement on July 1 marking the transfer of USAID to the State Department, Rubio said the US was abandoning what he called a charity-based model and would focus on empowering countries to grow sustainably.
The WFP says 319 million people have limited access to food worldwide. Of those, 1.9 million people are gripped by catastrophic hunger and on the brink of famine, primarily in Gaza and Sudan.
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