Latest news with #Plumpy'Nut
Metro
17-05-2025
- Business
- Metro
Enough food to feed 3,500,000 people for a month left to rot due to Trump cuts
Food that could feed 3.5 million people for a month has reportedly been left to rot in warehouses across the world because of US aid cuts. Around 60,000 metric tons of supplies meant for hunger stricken regions such as Gaza and Sudan are stuck in warehouses in Houston, Djibouti, Durban and Dubai, according to aid agency sources. It comes after US president Donald Trump cut funding to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in January. Some stocks are due to expire as early as July and will likely to be destroyed or used as animal feed, the sources told Reuters. The warehouses are run by USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), while the food is sourced from US farmers and manufacturers they said. The supplies are worth more than $98 million, according to a document reviewed by Reuters, which was shared by an aid official and verified by a US government source as up to date. That food could sustain over a million people for three months or feed Gaza's entire population for six weeks, according to World Food Programme data Around 343 million people are facing acute levels of food insecurity around the globe, says the World Food Programme. Of those, 1.9 million people are experiencing catastrophic hunger. Most of them are in Gaza and Sudan, but areas of South Sudan, Haiti and Mali are also affected. The US government has issued waivers for some humanitarian programmes but the food is stuck at the warehouses due to the cancellation of contracts and freezing of funds needed to pay suppliers, shippers and contractors, according to the sources, which include former USAID employees. They said a proposal to hand the stocks to aid organisations able to distribute them is on hold and awaiting approval from the State Department's Office of Foreign Assistance. Almost all of USAID staff will lose their jobs in July and September, according to a notification submitted to Congress in March. The former USAID sources said many of the critical staff needed to manage the warehouses or move the supplies will leave in July. The United States is responsible for at least 38% of all aid contributions across the world, according to the United Nations and distributed$61 billion in foreign assistance last year. Just over half of this was through USAID. US food aid includes ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) such as high-energy biscuits and Plumpy'Nut, a peanut-based paste. Navyn Salem, the founder of Edesia, a US based manufacturer of the paste, said USAID's termination of transportation contracts had created a 5,000 tonne stockpile that could feed more than 484,000 children. She said she was hopeful, however, that the product could still be distributed to those who desperately needed it. More Trending Action Against Hunger, a charity that relied on the US for more than 30% of its global budget, said last month the cuts had already led to the deaths of at least six children at its programmes in the Congo, due to projects having to be suspended. Jeanette Bailey, director of nutrition at the International Rescue Committee, which receives much of its funding from the US, said it was scaling back its programmes following the cuts. She said the impact of Trump's cuts was difficult to measure, particularly in places where aid programmes no longer operate. 'What we do know, though, is that if a child's in an inpatient stabilization centre and they're no longer able to access treatment, more than 60% of those children are at risk of dying very quickly,' she added. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Map shows severe storms in US after 21 killed across three states MORE: 'Uber has innovated so hard… they invented a bus' MORE: 'Armed and dangerous' prisoners escape through hole behind toilet while guard was on break
Time of India
17-05-2025
- Health
- Time of India
Trump's USAID cuts leads to wastage of food for 3.5 million per month
When a major policy ends, it can ripple far beyond national borders, triggering global consequences. The sudden halt of USAID funding didn't just affect budgets; it disrupted lifesaving food chains, shuttered clinics, and silenced community programs that millions depended on for survival. Approximately 60,000 metric tons of US-funded food aid, valued at $98 million and sufficient to feed 3.5 million people for a month, remain unused in warehouses across Houston, Djibouti, Durban, and Dubai. These supplies, including high-energy biscuits and fortified grains, were intended for crisis-hit regions such as Gaza, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, abrupt funding cuts and administrative upheavals under the Trump administration have stalled their distribution, leaving the food at risk of expiration and potential disposal. Live Events The disruption stems from the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), with over 90% of its foreign aid contracts terminated and $60 billion in assistance slashed globally Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old appointee from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, now oversees the Office of Foreign Assistance, where internal proposals to release the stranded food await approval. The human cost of these cuts is profound. In northeastern Nigeria, Bulama, a mother who previously lost triplets to hunger, enrolled her underweight twins in a Mercy Corps program providing Plumpy'Nut—a therapeutic peanut paste. After USAID funding ceased in February, the program ended, and one of her twins died two weeks later. Navyn Salem, founder of Edesia Nutrition, which produces Plumpy'Nut, reports $13 million worth of the product sitting idle in her Rhode Island warehouse. She remains hopeful for a resolution to deliver the aid to those in need. Organizations like Action Against Hunger have been forced to halt over 50 projects in 20 countries, with reports of child deaths in the Democratic Republic of the Congo due to suspended operations. While some aid programs have been reinstated following internal and congressional pressure, many remain in limbo. The World Food Programme warns that the elimination of emergency food assistance in 14 countries could be a "death sentence" for millions facing extreme hunger.
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Edesia Nutrition: 120K boxes of food at risk of expiring due to funding cuts
NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. (WPRI) — More than 120,000 boxes of fortified peanut paste — which Edesia Nutrition ships globally to combat severe malnutrition — will soon expire due to a lack of government funding. Navyn Salem, founder and CEO of Edesia Nutrition, told 12 News the nonprofit relies heavily on its monthly payments from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). But the North Kingstown-based nonprofit has struggled in recent months to continue its life-saving mission because of the Department of Government Efficiency's efforts to dismantle USAID. 'The termination of USAID is putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of malnourished children at risk around the world,' Salem said. 'Children can't wait for the government or other international agencies to figure out a solution. We have to act now.' RELATED: Edesia Nutrition cuts 10% of workforce due to lack of USAID funding Salem said her nonprofit has been operating without 85% of its funding. The boxes of Plumpy'Nut sitting in Edesia Nutrition's warehouse were supposed to be shipped to Sudan, where Salem said the situation is dire. 'This is one of the most critical countries that need our support,' Salem said. Salem told 12 News she's waiting on a transportation contract from the federal government to send the boxes to Sudan. But if she doesn't get that approval within the next month, the United Nations won't allow her to ship it out. In an effort to try and ship the Plumpy'Nut without the transportation contract, Edesia Nutrition has launched a Mother's Day donation drive. 'Malnutrition and undernutrition are 100% preventable,' Salem said. 'As a mother myself, it's unconscionable that children are starving to death.' 'We have the solution; we just need the funding to get our life-saving Plumpy'Nut to them,' she continued. 'A $50 donation buys one box of Plumpy'Nut that will save one child's life. This will help us give mothers around the world what they want most — healthy children.' Salem is encouraging everyone who can to donate in honor of their mother. She said each gift will be matched up to $2.4 million. Anyone interested in donating to Edesia Nutrition can do so online. Download the and apps to get breaking news and weather alerts. Watch or with the new . Follow us on social media: Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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.'
