After Elon Musk delivered a public show to save the obvious mistakes in massive cuts on Doge, the Trump administration quietly doubled its decision to stop sending emergency food to millions of children starving in Bangladesh, Somalia and other countries. Without urgent intervention, many of these children are likely to die within a few months, experts told me.
Doge took over USAID in February, and warned the global health community by issuing stopwork orders to two American companies that make life-saving peanut pastes, widely recognized as the best treatment for malnutrition. Edesia and Mana Nutrition companies then received USAID Go-Amead to continue their USAID work. However, soon after, their contract was officially cancelled. When news of the cancellation was released, Elon Musk vowed to investigate and “fix” the issue. A few hours later, musk announcement That one contract had been restored a few days ago. That night, the second company received a notice that it had the contract I’ve recovered.
But according to Mana and Edesia, it was just the beginning of the story. The revived contract in February applied to old orders of emergency foods that Mana and Edesia were already in the middle of fulfilling. But two weeks ago, without fanfare, the Trump administration cancelled all future orders, everything beyond the old orders that had previously been revived. Atlantic Ocean. The move rejected a contract the following year to provide emergency paste to around 3 million children. Moreover, the administration has not been awarded separate contracts to shipping companies, leaving much of the food guaranteed by the original restoration agreement stuck in the US, according to both companies.
Globally, almost Half of all deaths Among children under the age of 5, this is due to malnutrition. Once a child reaches the most serious stage, people old enough to lose teeth can do them. When cells stop synthesising pigments, their black hair turns orange. Their bodies shrink, and some lose their ability to feel hungry. Before the 21st century, hungry children could only be treated in hospitals, and among their small pieces recognized, the third would die, said Mark Manaly, a professor of pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis. The invention of a new type of emergency food allowed parents to treat their children at home. According to the International Rescue Committee, more than 90% have recovered within weeks of treatment.
The plump version, the original brand version, was first used to treat children in the early 2000s, and in 2011 the US began supplying it abroad, Manalie told me. Pouch of peanut butter fortified with powdered milk, sugar, vitamins, minerals and oils – essentially an oversized ketchup packet. A shrunken stomach Digestive more than a complete diet. Packets are kept without a refrigerator, which is useful in hungry settings such as refugee camps and war zones. They are ready to eat, so parents don’t have to worry about dissolving their contents in clean water. The six-week supply is $40, and three packets per day meet all the basic nutritional needs of children between six months and five years. This regimen regularly saves even those who are only a few days from death. Lawrence Gostin, director of the National and World Health Law Institute in Georgetown, told me that plump and easy-to-use therapeutic foods are “a unique achievement of the last few decades of public health industry.”
Typically, the United States provides emergency foods to hungry children through a multi-stage process. UNICEF and the World Food Program should predict a few months in advance how much paste you need to send to different countries and ask USAID to purchase. Previously, USAID hired Edesia (based in Rhode Island) and Mana (based in Georgia) to make the paste, which was then paid to ship the boxes overseas. The United Nations handles delivery once food reaches the port, and organizations such as children and doctors without borders can usually carry cargo to children who ultimately consume them.
The Trump administration has broken every step in its system. According to Mana CEO Mark Moore and Edesia CEO Navyn Salem, USAID agreed to purchase more than 1 million boxes of medical food in October. The World Food Program and Unicef had planned to distribute the contents of the order early in March. Atlantic Ocean. However, on April 4, both Edesia and Mana received emails from State Department staff. (These countries: Bangladesh, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen, where the United States has individually cancelled all humanitarian assistance.)
When I spoke to Moore, he panned his phone onto the production floor and showed me the box on top of a box of peanut paste stacked on the wall. Moore said it was scary for children who die without paste. Without it, he said, “They’re locked up. They’re just locked up.” He also worries about Americans who rely on their business for their livelihood. “All we’re doing is to mow farmers and hurt children. That seems like a terrible plan to me,” he said. Meanwhile, Edesia, which has halted production for the first time in more than a decade since its initial cancellation notification, is making just 2,000 plump packets a day, rather than the usual 10,000, Salem said.
Both Moore and Salem said they don’t know how they’ll ship even if USAID hasn’t cancelled the order itself. To the best of their knowledge, the US government has failed to award many anticipated contracts to the shipping companies Moore and Salem have long used to send emergency food abroad. This month, Salem said Edesia was able to ship 42,000 boxes of emergency food to moderately malnourished children 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 reason to do so. There are no hundreds of thousands of food left the US from the old revived orders of both companies. “We need products to leave the factory within four months,” Salem told me, to at least ensure that the shelf life of arrival in Africa and Asia. She told me she didn’t know who to call at USAID or the State Department to make it happen.
On April 10, Moore received an email from a State Department official. He said her team is seeking approval to ship the paste that is already manufactured. “I don’t know the timeline for this approval,” the staff wrote. “But know that you’re trying to make sure your products aren’t wasted.”
Even if you make it abroad before the paste expires, it may not fall into the hands of your child. One of UNICEF’s leading last mile distributors, Save The Children usually distributes emergency foods at clinics where mothers also give birth and babies can be taken for health screening. However, the organization has been forced to stop working in around 1,000 clinics since Trump took office in January and since taking office in January.
In a statement, UNICEF told me that the Trump administration has not yet notified the organization of the cancelled order. UNICEF is a project in which 7 million children will need treatment for extreme malnutrition in 2025. Even before the USAID cuts, only 4.2 million of them had a budget to treat them. Mana and Edesia usually provide 10-20% of UNICEF’s annual emergency treatment foods, while USAID supplies half of the overall funding for nutritional treatment and hunger intake services. “Today, we have no visibility into future funding from the US government,” the statement read. According to Odile Caron, a food sourcing specialist with no borders, producers usually go six months to fill orders as big as those canceled by the US. UNICEF needs its food in a much shorter time. If a malnourished child has no access to emergency food due to a US government decision, “half of them dies in three months, the rest is a terrible disorder, most of them neurocognitive,” Manary also told me she conducted a plump clinical trial.
As the dissolution of USAID began in January, most of the agency was hampered and the rest was absorbed by the State Department, but the Trump administration claims that foreign aid will be allowed to continue. Just yesterday, a State Department spokesman told reporters, “We know that we are a country with incredible resources. We know that. And we have an incredible responsibility and we will not be able to move away from them.” The White House did not answer my questions about its sentiment and the contradictions between the administration’s cancelled order, the State Department’s order. Usaid, Doge, and Musk did not respond to requests for comment. According to NPRSyrian programmes to feed anticipated mothers and young children were recently said that the contracts have escaped the government’s continued cuts. However, a separate agreement funding the program’s staff made no one able to do the job. Meanwhile, all of its pastings are still stacked in Moore’s warehouse.
At Trump’s first cabinet meeting in February, Musk admitted that a rift in the doge of foreign aid was in a hurry and pledged, “When we make a mistake, we will fix it very quickly.” However, it appears that the White House has done nothing yet to resolve this issue. Instead, they put two American companies in purgatory that make the products that dying children need to survive. He is ready to pack and distribute hundreds of thousands of boxes of boxes, as Moore reminded me through our conversation. This means that two things will happen next. “It will be shipped or destroyed.”
