Latest news with #Edesia
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Food For Millions Rots in Storage After Trump's USAID Cuts
Roughly 60,000 metric tons of food—enough to feed 3.5 million people for a month—is sitting unused at the risk of going bad after the Trump administration slashed funding to USAID earlier this year. According to sources speaking to Reuters, the rations are spread across four warehouses in Houston, Djibouti, Durban, and Dubai and made up of cereals, pulses, and cooking oil. The food, valued at $98 million, was intended for emergency distribution in hunger-stricken regions including Gaza, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Most of it will now end up in incinerators or as animal feed. Nearly 500 tons of high-energy biscuits in Dubai are set to expire in July, one former USAID official told Reuters. They could have fed 27,000 acutely malnourished children for a month. The failure stems from USAID's rapid dismantling by the Trump administration and a pause on the contracts and funds needed to ship supplies to where they are needed. 'USAID is continuously consulting with partners on where to best distribute commodities at USAID prepositioning warehouses for use in emergency programs ahead of their expiration dates,' a State Department spokesperson said. Internal proposals to release the food remain on hold, awaiting sign-off from the Office of Foreign Assistance, now headed by 28-year-old Elon Musk appointee, Jeremy Lewin. Navyn Salem, founder of Edesia, a company manufacturing the energy paste Plumpy'Nut, said that her organization is now sitting on $13 million worth of food. She is 'hopeful' that a solution will be found soon to get her product to those who desperately need it. The U.S. is the world's largest aid donor, accounting for nearly 40 percent of United Nations contributions. Millions are reliant on the provisions it brings. The charity Action Against Hunger has reported that the cuts are already costing lives, with six children starving to death in the DRC alone after it was forced to suspend its operations. 'If a child's in an inpatient stabilization center and they're no longer able to access treatment,' said Jeanette Bailey from the International Rescue Committee, 'more than 60 percent of those children are at risk of dying very quickly.'
Boston Globe
08-05-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
US Representative Magaziner blasts ‘absolute cruelty' of Trump budget
'The good news is that historically — under both Democratic and Republican presidents, including the first Trump administration — the president's budget is ignored by Congress,' Magaziner said. The more immediate threat, he said, is Get Rhode Map A weekday briefing from veteran Rhode Island reporters, focused on the things that matter most in the Ocean State. Enter Email Sign Up Magaziner said nearly one-third of Rhode Islanders get their health insurance from Medicaid. Advertisement 'This would be devastating,' he said. 'If these cuts go through, not only will it hurt the thousands of Rhode Islanders who get Medicaid insurance, but it also would hurt health care providers. So nursing homes would be losing revenue and might have to shut down.' Some Republicans see the political peril of such proposals, Magaziner said. 'I think it's starting to dawn on some of these Republican members that if they kick thousands of their own constituents off of health care or cut food benefits or cut education in order to pay for tax cuts for the rich, they're gonna pay for it in the midterms,' he said. Advertisement He said he is urging GOP colleagues to instead only extend tax cuts that help the middle class, while ending tax cuts for the wealthy, thereby avoiding deeper spending cuts. But, Magaziner said, 'The bulk of the Republican conference in the House is sort of still stuck in the old mode of thinking every tax cut is a good tax cut, no matter how rich the recipient is. And we've got to get them off of that and make them feel some pain if they go forward with it.' Meanwhile, Magaziner said he plans to speak on the House floor every day the chamber is in session until federal funding is restored for the peanut paste that Rhode Island's Based in North Kingstown, Edesia is one of two plants in the United States that manufactures the Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food, along with MANA Nutrition in Fitzgerald, Ga. Edesia CEO Navyn Salem sent out an email Sunday, saying, 'I am waiting for a piece of paper' and 'if I do not receive it, it could mean a death sentence for 123,188 children in Sudan.' She said more than 120,000 boxes of the peanut paste have been sitting in Edesia's Rhode Island warehouse since February, but she can't ship it to Sudan until a transportation contract is signed by a 28-year-old acting director of the State Department's Office of Foreign Assistance, who won't meet with her. Advertisement 'It is just so incredibly frustrating,' Magaziner said. 'Over the last decade-plus, 25 million kids around the world have had their lives saved by this product made right here in Rhode Island. Under the Trump administration, the shipments have been stopped.' The Trump administration has said it plans to continue this program, he said, but the delays continue. And, he said, 'Every day that this stuff is sitting in a warehouse in Rhode Island is a day when thousands of kids are unnecessarily wasting away.' Related : On the podcast, Magaziner also spoke about why he To get the latest episode each week, follow Rhode Island Report podcast , , and other podcasting platforms, or listen in the player above. Edward Fitzpatrick can be reached at
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Emergency Food for 3 Million Children Is Stuck in DOGE Limbo
After Elon Musk made a public show of remedying an apparent error in DOGE's massive cuts to foreign aid, the Trump administration has quietly doubled down on its decision to stop sending emergency food to millions of children who are starving in Bangladesh, Somalia, and other countries. Without urgent intervention, many of these children are likely to die within months, experts told me. As DOGE was gutting USAID in February, it alarmed the global-health community by issuing stop-work orders to the two American companies that make a lifesaving peanut paste widely recognized as the best treatment for malnutrition. The companies—Edesia and Mana Nutrition—subsequently received USAID's go-ahead to continue their work. But soon after that, their contracts were officially canceled. When news of the cancellation was made public, Elon Musk vowed to investigate the issue and 'fix it.' Hours later, Musk announced that one contract had been restored days earlier; that night, the second company received notice that its contract had been reinstated. According to Mana and Edesia, however, that was only the start of the story. The contracts reinstated in February applied to old orders for emergency therapeutic food that Mana and Edesia were already in the middle of fulfilling. But two weeks ago, without any fanfare, the Trump administration then canceled all of its upcoming orders—that is, everything beyond those old orders that were previously reinstated—according to emails obtained by The Atlantic. The move reneged on an agreement to provide about 3 million children with emergency paste over approximately the next year. What's more, according to the two companies, the administration has also not awarded separate contracts to shipping companies, leaving much of the food assured by the original reinstated contracts stuck in the United States. Globally, nearly half of all deaths among children under 5 are attributed to malnutrition. When children reach the most severe stage, those old enough to have teeth lose can them. Black hair turns orange as cells stop synthesizing pigment. Their bodies shrivel, and some lose the capacity to feel hunger at all. Before the 21st century, starving children could only be treated in a hospital, and among the sliver of them who were admitted, a third would die, Mark Manary, a pediatrics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. The invention of a new type of emergency food allowed parents to treat their own kids at home; more than 90 percent recover within weeks of treatment, according to the International Rescue Committee. The original brand-name version, Plumpy'Nut, was first used to treat children in the early 2000s, and the U.S. started supplying it to foreign countries in 2011, Manary told me. It's a pouch—basically an oversize ketchup packet—of peanut butter fortified with powdered milk, sugar, vitamins, minerals, and oil, a mixture that's easier for shrunken stomachs to digest than a full meal. The packets keep without a refrigerator, making them useful in hunger-prone settings like refugee camps and war zones. They come ready to eat, so parents don't need to worry about dissolving the contents in clean water. A six-week supply costs $40, and three packets a day fulfills all the basic nutritional needs of children ages six months to 5 years. This regimen regularly saves the lives of even those who are mere days from death. Lawrence Gostin, the director of Georgetown's Institute for National and Global Health Law, told me that ready-to-use therapeutic foods like Plumpy'Nut are 'the singular public-health achievement of the last several decades'—more consequential, experts reiterated to me, than even antibiotics or vaccines. Typically, the U.S. supplies starving children with emergency therapeutic food through a multistep process. UNICEF and the World Food Programme forecast months in advance how much paste they'll need to send to various countries, and ask USAID to buy some of it. Previously, USAID hired Edesia (which is based in Rhode Island) and Mana (based in Georgia) to make the paste, then paid to ship the boxes overseas. The United Nations handles delivery once the food reaches port, and organizations such as Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders typically carry shipments to the children who ultimately consume them. The Trump administration has broken every step of that system. According to Mana CEO Mark Moore and Edesia CEO Navyn Salem, USAID agreed back in October to buy more than 1 million boxes of therapeutic food. The World Food Programme and UNICEF planned to distribute the contents of this order as early as March, according to an email obtained by The Atlantic. But on April 4, both Edesia and Mana received an email from a staffer at the State Department that said the plans for 10 countries to receive the emergency paste would not move forward. (Those countries: Bangladesh, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen, to which the U.S. has separately canceled all humanitarian aid.) When I spoke with Moore, he panned his phone across the production floor to show me boxes upon boxes of peanut paste piled against the walls. Moore told me he is terrified for the children who will die without the paste. Without it, he said, 'they're trapped. Just trapped.' He is also worried for the Americans who rely on his business for their own livelihoods. 'All we're doing is cutting farmers and hurting kids. That just seems like a terrible plan to me,' he said. Meanwhile, Edesia, which had stopped its production for the first time in more than a decade after the first cancellation notice, is now making just 2,000 Plumpy'Nut packets a day instead of the usual 10,000, Salem said. Moore and Salem both told me that even if USAID had not canceled the order itself, they have no idea how they would have shipped it. As far as they know, the U.S. government has failed to award many expected contracts to the shipping companies that Moore and Salem have long used to send their emergency food products overseas. This month, Salem said, Edesia was able to ship 42,000 boxes of emergency food for moderately malnourished kids to Somalia, but was unable to secure transport for another approved shipment of 123,888 boxes for acutely malnourished children to Sudan. Salem says she has no clue why. Hundreds of thousands of boxes of food from both companies' old, reinstated orders still have not left the U.S. 'We need product to leave the factories at no later than four months' after it is manufactured, Salem told me, to ensure at least a year of shelf life when it arrives in Africa or Asia. She does not know who to call, at USAID or the State Department, to make that happen, she told me. [Read: The cruel attack on USAID] On April 10, Moore received an email from a State Department staffer who said that her team is seeking approval to ship the paste that has already been manufactured—if not to the original intended recipients, then somewhere. 'We are not sure of the timeline for this approval,' the staffer wrote. 'But please know that we are trying to ensure that no commodities go to waste.' Even if the paste makes it overseas before it expires, it might not make it into children's hands. Save the Children, one of UNICEF's major last-mile distributors, typically gives out emergency therapeutic food at clinics where mothers can also give birth and take their infants for health screenings. But the organization has been forced to stop its work in nearly 1,000 clinics since Trump's inauguration in January because of U.S. funding that his administration eliminated or failed to renew, Emily Byers, a managing director at the organization, told me. In a statement, UNICEF told me that the Trump administration still has not informed the organization of the canceled orders. UNICEF projects that 7 million children will require treatment for extreme malnutrition in 2025. Even before the USAID cuts, it had the budget to treat only 4.2 million of them. Mana and Edesia typically provide 10 to 20 percent of UNICEF's annual emergency therapeutic food, and USAID supplies half of its overall funding for nutrition treatment and hunger-prevention services. 'Today, we have no visibility on future funding from the US Government,' the statement read. Typically, producers have half a year to fill an order as big as the one the U.S. canceled, according to Odile Caron, a food-procurement specialist at Doctors Without Borders. UNICEF needs that food in much less time. If malnourished kids don't get access to emergency therapeutic food because of the U.S. government's decisions, 'in three months, half of them will be dead, and the rest will have terrible disabilities, mostly neurocognitive,' Manary, who also ran the first clinical trials on Plumpy'Nut, told me. Since the dissolution of USAID began in January—most of the agency has been gutted, the rest absorbed by the State Department—the Trump administration has insisted that lifesaving foreign aid will be allowed to continue. Just yesterday, a State Department spokesperson told reporters, 'We know that we are a country with incredible resources. We know that. And we have incredible responsibilities, and we do not shy away from them.' The White House did not answer my questions about the discrepancy between that sentiment and the orders that the administration cancelled. USAID, the State Department, DOGE, and Musk did not respond to requests for comment. According to NPR, a program in Syria that feeds expecting mothers and young children was told that its contract was spared from the government's ongoing cuts. But a separate contract funding the program's staff was terminated, leaving no one to do the work. Meanwhile, all that paste is still piled up in Moore's warehouse. [Read: America can't just unpause USAID] During Trump's first Cabinet meeting, in February, Musk acknowledged that DOGE's teardown of foreign assistance had been hasty, then pledged that 'when we make mistakes, we will fix it very quickly.' But the White House seems to have done nothing yet to fix this problem. Instead, it is keeping in purgatory two American companies that make a product that dying children need to survive. As Moore reminded me throughout our conversation, he has hundreds of thousands of boxes of paste packed and ready for distribution. That means one of two things happens next: 'It will get shipped or it will get destroyed.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
17-04-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Emergency Food for 3 Million Children Is Stuck in DOGE Limbo
After Elon Musk made a public show of remedying an apparent error in DOGE's massive cuts to foreign aid, the Trump administration has quietly doubled down on its decision to stop sending emergency food to millions of children who are starving in Bangladesh, Somalia, and other countries. Without urgent intervention, many of these children are likely to die within months, experts told me. As DOGE was gutting USAID in February, it alarmed the global-health community by issuing stop-work orders to the two American companies that make a lifesaving peanut paste widely recognized as the best treatment for malnutrition. The companies—Edesia and Mana Nutrition—subsequently received USAID's go-ahead to continue their work. But soon after that, their contracts were officially canceled. When news of the cancellation was made public, Elon Musk vowed to investigate the issue and 'fix it.' Hours later, Musk announced that one contract had been restored days earlier; that night, the second company received notice that its contract had been reinstated. According to Mana and Edesia, however, that was only the start of the story. The contracts reinstated in February applied to old orders for emergency therapeutic food that Mana and Edesia were already in the middle of fulfilling. But two weeks ago, without any fanfare, the Trump administration then canceled all of its upcoming orders—that is, everything beyond those old orders that were previously reinstated—according to emails obtained by The Atlantic. The move reneged on an agreement to provide about 3 million children with emergency paste over approximately the next year. What's more, according to the two companies, the administration has also not awarded separate contracts to shipping companies, leaving much of the food assured by the original reinstated contracts stuck in the United States. Globally, nearly half of all deaths among children under 5 are attributed to malnutrition. When children reach the most severe stage, those old enough to have teeth lose can them. Black hair turns orange as cells stop synthesizing pigment. Their bodies shrivel, and some lose the capacity to feel hunger at all. Before the 21st century, starving children could only be treated in a hospital, and among the sliver of them who were admitted, a third would die, Mark Manary, a pediatrics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. The invention of a new type of emergency food allowed parents to treat their own kids at home; more than 90 percent recover within weeks of treatment, according to the International Rescue Committee. The original brand-name version, Plumpy'Nut, was first used to treat children in the early 2000s, and the U.S. started supplying it to foreign countries in 2011, Manary told me. It's a pouch—basically an oversize ketchup packet—of peanut butter fortified with powdered milk, sugar, vitamins, minerals, and oil, a mixture that's easier for shrunken stomachs to digest than a full meal. The packets keep without a refrigerator, making them useful in hunger-prone settings like refugee camps and war zones. They come ready to eat, so parents don't need to worry about dissolving the contents in clean water. A six-week supply costs $40, and three packets a day fulfills all the basic nutritional needs of children ages six months to 5 years. This regimen regularly saves the lives of even those who are mere days from death. Lawrence Gostin, the director of Georgetown's Institute for National and Global Health Law, told me that ready-to-use therapeutic foods like Plumpy'Nut are 'the singular public-health achievement of the last several decades'—more consequential, experts reiterated to me, than even antibiotics or vaccines. Typically, the U.S. supplies starving children with emergency therapeutic food through a multistep process. UNICEF and the World Food Programme forecast months in advance how much paste they'll need to send to various countries, and ask USAID to buy some of it. Previously, USAID hired Edesia (which is based in Rhode Island) and Mana (based in Georgia) to make the paste, then paid to ship the boxes overseas. The United Nations handles delivery once the food reaches port, and organizations such as Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders typically carry shipments to the children who ultimately consume them. The Trump administration has broken every step of that system. According to Mana CEO Mark Moore and Edesia CEO Navyn Salem, USAID agreed back in October to buy more than 1 million boxes of therapeutic food. The World Food Programme and UNICEF planned to distribute the contents of this order as early as March, according to an email obtained by The Atlantic. But on April 4, both Edesia and Mana received an email from a staffer at the State Department that said the plans for 10 countries to receive the emergency paste would not move forward. (Those countries: Bangladesh, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen, to which the U.S. has separately canceled all humanitarian aid.) When I spoke with Moore, he panned his phone across the production floor to show me boxes upon boxes of peanut paste piled against the walls. Moore told me he is terrified for the children who will die without the paste. Without it, he said, 'they're trapped. Just trapped.' He is also worried for the Americans who rely on his business for their own livelihoods. 'All we're doing is cutting farmers and hurting kids. That just seems like a terrible plan to me,' he said. Meanwhile, Edesia, which had stopped its production for the first time in more than a decade after the first cancellation notice, is now making just 2,000 Plumpy'Nut packets a day instead of the usual 10,000, Salem said. Moore and Salem both told me that even if USAID had not canceled the order itself, they have no idea how they would have shipped it. As far as they know, the U.S. government has failed to award many expected contracts to the shipping companies that Moore and Salem have long used to send their emergency food products overseas. This month, Salem said, Edesia was able to ship 42,000 boxes of emergency food for moderately malnourished kids to Somalia, but was unable to secure transport for another approved shipment of 123,888 boxes for acutely malnourished children to Sudan. Salem says she has no clue why. Hundreds of thousands of boxes of food from both companies' old, reinstated orders still have not left the U.S. 'We need product to leave the factories at no later than four months' after it is manufactured, Salem told me, to ensure at least a year of shelf life when it arrives in Africa or Asia. She does not know who to call, at USAID or the State Department, to make that happen, she told me. On April 10, Moore received an email from a State Department staffer who said that her team is seeking approval to ship the paste that has already been manufactured—if not to the original intended recipients, then somewhere. 'We are not sure of the timeline for this approval,' the staffer wrote. 'But please know that we are trying to ensure that no commodities go to waste.' Even if the paste makes it overseas before it expires, it might not make it into children's hands. Save the Children, one of UNICEF's major last-mile distributors, typically gives out emergency therapeutic food at clinics where mothers can also give birth and take their infants for health screenings. But the organization has been forced to stop its work in nearly 1,000 clinics since Trump's inauguration in January because of U.S. funding that his administration eliminated or failed to renew, Emily Byers, a managing director at the organization, told me. In a statement, UNICEF told me that the Trump administration still has not informed the organization of the canceled orders. UNICEF projects that 7 million children will require treatment for extreme malnutrition in 2025. Even before the USAID cuts, it had the budget to treat only 4.2 million of them. Mana and Edesia typically provide 10 to 20 percent of UNICEF's annual emergency therapeutic food, and USAID supplies half of its overall funding for nutrition treatment and hunger-prevention services. 'Today, we have no visibility on future funding from the US Government,' the statement read. Typically, producers have half a year to fill an order as big as the one the U.S. canceled, according to Odile Caron, a food-procurement specialist at Doctors Without Borders. UNICEF needs that food in much less time. If malnourished kids don't get access to emergency therapeutic food because of the U.S. government's decisions, 'in three months, half of them will be dead, and the rest will have terrible disabilities, mostly neurocognitive,' Manary, who also ran the first clinical trials on Plumpy'Nut, told me. Since the dissolution of USAID began in January—most of the agency has been gutted, the rest absorbed by the State Department—the Trump administration has insisted that lifesaving foreign aid will be allowed to continue. Just yesterday, a State Department spokesperson told reporters, 'We know that we are a country with incredible resources. We know that. And we have incredible responsibilities, and we do not shy away from them.' The White House did not answer my questions about the discrepancy between that sentiment and the orders that the administration cancelled. USAID, the State Department, DOGE, and Musk did not respond to requests for comment. According to NPR, a program in Syria that feeds expecting mothers and young children was told that its contract was spared from the government's ongoing cuts. But a separate contract funding the program's staff was terminated, leaving no one to do the work. Meanwhile, all that paste is still piled up in Moore's warehouse. During Trump's first Cabinet meeting, in February, Musk acknowledged that DOGE's teardown of foreign assistance had been hasty, then pledged that 'when we make mistakes, we will fix it very quickly.' But the White House seems to have done nothing yet to fix this problem. Instead, it is keeping in purgatory two American companies that make a product that dying children need to survive. As Moore reminded me throughout our conversation, he has hundreds of thousands of boxes of paste packed and ready for distribution. That means one of two things happens next: 'It will get shipped or it will get destroyed.'
Boston Globe
10-04-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
R.I.'s Edesia Nutrition tries to ‘find a way' as Trump dismantles USAID
Founded in 2010, the Get Rhode Map A weekday briefing from veteran Rhode Island reporters, focused on the things that matter most in the Ocean State. Enter Email Sign Up Last year, Edesia received 85 percent of its business from USAID, and now that humanitarian agency is a major target in a campaign by President Trump and Elon Musk to slash the size of the federal government. In March, Musk and Pod Save America host Jon Favreau Advertisement Salem said 'the roller coaster has been nonstop' since Jan. 29, when Edesia received a stop-work order from the government. 'This was then rescinded a week later,' she said. 'Shortly after that, our contracts were terminated. Twenty-four hours after that, they were turned back on.' Advertisement With the USAID payment system in shambles, Edesia just received a $16 million payment last week for orders placed last year, but it's still awaiting payment for another $20 million in orders, she said. Meanwhile, the supply chain has been disrupted, leaving product sitting in warehouses and on ships, rather than getting to the children that need it, she said. 'Every hour that this factory is down means 415 children will not get the lifesaving food that they need,' Salem said. The Edesia Nutrition factory in North Kingstown, R.I. Edward Fitzpatrick Salem said USAID's workforce of 14,000 has been slashed to 700 employees, and the remainder are going to be terminated by Sept. 1. She said the agency will be absorbed into the State Department on July 1, but that represents a big loss of institutional knowledge. 'So we are quite aware that there will be no future contracts for the remainder of the year, as far as we can tell,' she said. Salem said she was forced to lay off 16 staff members, representing about 10 percent of Edesia's workforce. 'This was a very difficult decision to have to make,' she said. 'But with the amount of uncertainty going on still, on a day-to-day basis, it's almost impossible to be able to run a business in a climate like this.' Salem said Edesia fully understands the need for efficiency, but she also emphasized the value of humanitarian aid and the 'soft power' it provides. 'Emergency food assistance is something that both Democrats and Republicans believe should continue, and the reason that food security is so important is because it translates directly to national security,' she said. Countries with large numbers of hungry people can face 'very violent, unstable situations,' Salem said. 'This is when people start to overthrow their governments.' And starvation can lead to mass migration, she said. Advertisement But boxes of the peanut paste produced in Rhode Island and Georgia are stamped with an American flag and the words 'From the American people,' she noted. 'Do you think that you'll ever forget that it was the American people that saved the life of your most precious child?' Salem said. 'I cannot think of a better investment.' If people are frustrated with what's happening, Salem said To get the latest episode each week, follow Rhode Island Report podcast , , and other podcasting platforms, or listen in the player above. Edward Fitzpatrick can be reached at
