Foreign Aid — News & Analysis

Life-saving food for malnourished children sits in warehouses as contracts are cancelled (March 5, 2025)

March 5, 2025 — U.S.-based nonprofits Edesia and Mana Nutrition — producers of ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF), the peanut-based paste that is the international standard treatment for severe acute malnutrition in young children — received sudden notices that their multimillion-dollar USAID contracts had been terminated, halting production and leaving warehouses full of food that could not be shipped. Hundreds of boxes of RUTF sat at Mana Nutrition's facility in Fitzgerald, Georgia; 123,000 boxes of RUTF purchased by the U.S. government for Sudan's malnourished children sat in a Rhode Island warehouse for months because no one had signed the transportation contracts needed to move them.

"Every week that we wait is another week where boxes do not go on our conveyor belts," said one producer. "And these children do not have time to waste." In total, an estimated $98 million in food aid was sitting unused and at risk of expiring in warehouses. In the United Arab Emirates, 500 tons of ready-to-eat, high-energy biscuits valued at $800,000 stored by USAID for disaster response expired in a Dubai warehouse with no staff to distribute them; incinerating the out-of-date food reportedly cost an additional $125,000. An additional 70,000 tons of USAID food aid may also have been destroyed.

The contracts were briefly reinstated after public outcry, then the situation reverted to chaos. UNICEF — which provides the bulk of RUTF to children globally — reported that the initial pause had "impacted programming for millions of children in roughly half of the countries where we work." Worldwide, nearly 150 million children under five suffer from stunting, and 45 million from wasting, the deadliest form of malnutrition. Loss of maternal and child nutrition programs was projected to worsen both, causing lifelong cognitive and developmental harm in the children who survived.