Vast supplies of U.S. aid remain stranded, despite State Department promises

Vast supplies of U.S. aid remain stranded, despite State Department promises

“DESTROY” stickers were affixed this week to hundreds of cases of U.S.-branded food aid — 15,000 pounds’ worth — that have languished for months in a Georgia warehouse and then expired before they could be sent overseas to famine-stricken areas like Sudan.

And Mana Nutrition’s warehouse holds plenty more of the peanut paste, a crucial element in treating malnutrition. A $50 million supply has been stacked for months in the nonprofit’s facility in Pooler, a short drive from Savannah, caught in the chaos as the Trump administration upended foreign aid and never shipped.

The food could still help 60 million people, Mana estimates.

“This is a giant glut,” chief operating officer David Todd Harmon said. “All contracted. All bought and paid for. It’s just not been picked up.”

A State Department memo in late May signaled that more than 60,000 metric tons of commodities were sitting in warehouses in the United States and around the world and that an “urgent” plan would begin to shift some of it. The logjam followed the Trump administration’s breakneck dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, slashing more than 80 percent of its programming and laying off all but a tiny fraction of its staffers. The agency’s doors officially closed July 1.

Those cuts deeply disrupted a once-robust pipeline that funneled more than $1 billion in commodities and nutritional supplements to crisis zones globally.

Packages of peanut paste, known as “ready to use therapeutic food,” or RUTF, at Mana Nutrition’s facility.

Mana’s decision to jettison part of its food cache was the third instance in recent weeks in which important nutrition and family planning assistance slated for overseas was marked for destruction. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, aid groups and activists have voiced outrage, with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calling the situation “indefensible.”

“These commodities were purchased by U.S. taxpayers to save lives — not to sit in warehouses or be incinerated,” Shaheen said in a statement.

The State Department memo, obtained by The Washington Post, noted that senior official Jeremy Lewin had approved moving 13,719 metric tons of commodities that “will expire within the next 14 months” and proposed focusing on the items “most at risk of spoilage if not moved in the next month.”

The other 47,991 metric tons in warehouses were to be transferred to the department for “continued management and implementation of programs,” the memo detailed.

Eleven days ago, the State Department issued a $52 million grant to the U.N. World Food Program — the key distributor of U.S. food aid overseas — to ship 12,000 metric tons of fortified cereal, vegetable oil, rice and yellow peas from warehouses in Djibouti and Houston to targets in Africa and Haiti. Gaza is not among them, despite the mass starvation there due to Israel’s months-long siege.

A department statement Friday said those supplies had been pre-positioned to draw upon for emerging needs and “were not delayed in delivery to any destination because they were not yet allocated to any specific programs.” Even so, an inspector general review of the warehouses is underway because of concerns that commodities may have been spoiled or damaged.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio assured lawmakers in May that no food aid would be wasted, but some of what is shipping out now could take months, not weeks, to reach its destination, aid experts say. That may be too late for people battling extreme hunger in Africa and the Middle East.

“For severely malnourished children in particular, they cannot have one week disruption in feeding, even that is too much for them,” said Kathrin Lauer, a 32-year veteran of USAID, who lost her job when her contract was terminated this year. “Even if Secretary Rubio says nobody has died doesn’t mean it’s true.”

A forklift driver unloads pallets of peanut paste at the Mana facility in Georgia.

In Bangladesh, life for those who depend on such assistance is increasingly dire. Hunger has risen steadily in recent years in a Rohingya refugee camp near Cox’s Bazar, where a million people have been trapped since they began fleeing their home country of Myanmar during sectarian violence in 2017. UNICEF has warned that about 15 percent of 500,000 children are already malnourished.

The Trump administration allocated $73 million to the World Food Program earlier this year to stave off drastic cuts that would have halved the refugees’ monthly food allotment to just $6. Yet as a monsoon rain thrummed on the top of his camp tent this week, community leader Shamsul Alam was grappling with news that WFP would no longer be giving food vouchers for children under 6 months old. Another initiative that provided $3 a month for fresh vegetables for children from highly vulnerable households would also be discontinued.

“If there are any more cuts in the future, we are going to die here,” said Alam, 65, a father of six. In his family, he’s particularly worried about his youngest, 1-year-old Ajida. “The international community should just go ahead and kill us if they can’t provide enough food.”

A skeleton crew of former USAID staffers, now at the State Department, is trying to accelerate food shipments. The effort is complicated by different contracting and payment systems, and the absence of scores of dismissed workers in receiving counties, according to both those who were at the agency and those who today are at the State Department.

In the spring, some career employees began warning that more than 1,000 metric tons of high-energy biscuits in a warehouse in Dubai — some initially intended for Gaza — were set to expire in July and September. They say their initial pleas to Lewin, then leading the department’s Office of Foreign Assistance, were ignored.

“There was a tremendous amount of effort from career staff to get his attention and his approval for any number of plans to disburse and reprogram those high-energy biscuits, particularly in Sudan,” said Sarah Charles, former head of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. “If it was incompetence, there was really, really no excuse for that incompetence, because things were really teed up for him to sign on the dotted line.”

In June, Lewin finally signed off on a plan to send 600 metric tons of unexpired biscuits to Syria, Myanmar and Bangladesh, but it was too late for the rest.

Mark Moore, chief executive of Mana Nutrition, said the 585 cases of peanut paste slated to be destroyed this month were overstock that could have been tucked into previous shipments, so “a big part of that is on us.” The warehouse manager planned to include them in the next shipment, but that fell through when a new government contract didn’t materialize. The boxes then became too dated to ship, the nonprofit said.

Mana Nutrition employee James Holt affixes “DESTROY” labels to U.S.-branded food aid that is now too old to be sent overseas for hunger relief.

Meanwhile, 400,000 cases of nutritional supplement — labeled “ready to use therapeutic food” and still fresh enough to send overseas — remain in the warehouse. “We have been paid,” Moore said, “but kids aren’t getting fed.”

About three weeks ago, Mana received word that 100,000 cases would be shipped to Nigeria and South Sudan in early August.

A similar situation has played out in Rhode Island, where the company Edesia Nutrition continues to hold about 185,000 boxes of nutritional supplement that have been paid for but not shipped by the U.S. government, CEO Navyn Salem said. The product’s value: $75 million.

Aid experts fear the federal cutbacks and distribution problems mean the government and humanitarian groups won’t be ready for the next major disaster.

“There is now huge uncertainty about the actual future of U.S. food aid and food insecurity work,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International. “It’s very unclear where the budget will land for humanitarian response and whether or not the Trump administration even intends to spend the money they already have.”

In the rescission package recently passed by Congress, the administration clawed back about $9 billion in foreign aid. An analysis by the Center for Global Development determined $1.3 billion in humanitarian assistance was part of that.

For the fiscal year starting in October, the White House recommended cutting humanitarian aid from $10 billion to $4 billion and zeroing out Food For Peace, the $1.6 billion program that purchases commodities from American farmers for overseas assistance. Lawmakers in both the House and the Senate want the latter preserved.

A spokesman for the State Department said it is “constantly assessing global humanitarian needs and expects to allocate additional resources to address those needs in line with U.S. interests.”

Aaron Schaffer and Alice Crites contributed to this report.