Updated on April 17, 2025 at 8:11 am
After Elon Musk made a public demonstration of solving an apparent error in the mass cuts of Doo to foreign aid, the Trump administration has quietly doubled in 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 in a few months, I was told experts.
As DOGE was crushing USAID in February, he alarmed the global health community by issuing unemployed work orders in the two American companies that make a life peanut paste widely recognized as the best treatment for malnutrition. The companies – Edresia and commands Nutrition – later received the advantage of USAID to continue their work. But shortly afterwards, their contracts were officially canceled. When the news of the cancellation was made public, Elon Musk pledged to investigate the problem and to “solve it”. Hours later, Musk announced that a contract had been restored days earlier; That night, the second company received the notice that their contract had been reinstated.
According to Mana and Edesia, however, this was only the beginning of the story. The contracts were restored in February applied to old emergency therapeutic eating orders that commanded and Edesia were already in the midst of complying. But two weeks ago, without any fanfare, the Trump administration canceled all its coming orders, that is, all that beyond these old orders that were previously refunded, according to the emails obtained by. The Atlantic. The movement resigned an agreement to provide about 3 million emergency pasta for approximately the following year. In addition, according to the two companies, the administration has also not given separate contracts to the shipping companies, leaving much of the food insured by the original contracts reinstated in the United States.
Globally, almost half of the deaths among children are attributed to malnutrition. When children reach the most severe stage, the old enough to have teeth can lose them. Black hair becomes orange as the cells stop synthesizing the pigment. Their bodies are disturbed and some lose their ability to feel hunger. Prior to the 21st century, hungry children could only be treated in a hospital and among those who were admitted, a third die would die, Mark Manary, a pediatrician at the University of Washington University in St. Louis, he told me. 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 percent is recovered in the weeks after treatment.
The original brand brand version, Plumpy’nut, was used to treat children in the early 2000’s, and the United States began supplying it to foreign countries in 2011, told me Manary. This is a bag, basically, a large ketchup package, of fortified cake butter with milk powder, sugar, vitamins, minerals and oil, an easier mixture to digest small stomachs than a complete meal. The packages remain without a fridge, which makes them useful in famine -prone environments, such as refugee camps and war areas. They come ready to eat, so parents do not have to worry about dissolving their content in clean water. A six -week supply costs $ 40 and three packages a day meets all the basic nutritional needs of children from six months to 5 years. This regime regularly saves the life of even those who are a few days of death. Lawrence Gostin, the director of the Georgetown Institute for National Health Law and the World Health Law, told me that therapeutic foods ready to use as Plumpy’nut are “the unique achievement of public health in recent decades”, more consequently, experts reiterated for me, even than antibiotics or vaccines.
Typically, the United States has a hunger for children with emergency therapeutic foods through a multispine process. UNICEF and the FOOD World Program provides for months in advance the amount of pasta they will have to send to various countries and ask USAID to buy a little. Previously, Usaid hired EDITA (based in Rhode Island) and Mana (based in Georgia) to make the pasta, then paid to send boxes abroad. The United Nations manage delivery once the food arrives at the port and organizations such as Save the Children and Meting without Borders usually bring shipments to the children who finally consume them.
Trump administration has broken all steps in this system. According to Mana CEO, Mark Moore and Edesia CEO, Navyn Salem, Usaid agreed in October to buy more than a million boxes of therapeutic food. The World Food and UNICEF program planned to distribute the contents of this order since March, according to an email obtained by The Atlantic. But on April 4, both Edesia and Mana received an email from a USAID staff who said that the plans of 10 countries to receive the emergency paste would not advance. (Most of the USAID has been erased, and what is left is in the process of absorbing the State Department. The countries listed in the email are: Bangladesh, Burundi, Cameroon, the Centro -African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen, to which the United States has been canceled in the United States.
When I talked to Moore, he traveled the phone to the production plant to show me boxes on boxes of peanut paste piled against the walls. Moore told me that he is landed by children who will die without the pasta. Without that, he said, “they are trapped. Only trapped.” He is also worried about the North -Americans who trust their business for their livelihoods. “All we do is cut the farmers and hurt the children. This is only a terrible plan for me,” he said. In the meantime, Edesia, which had stopped its production for the first time in more than a decade after the first cancellation warning, only 2,000 plomy packages a day instead of the usual 10,000, said Salem.
Moore and Salem told me that even if Usaid had not canceled the order itself, they have no idea how they would have sent it. As far as they know, the United States government has not granted many expected contracts to the shipping companies that Moore and Salem have long used to send their emergency food products abroad. This month, said Salem, Edesia was able to send 42,000 emergency food boxes for moderately malnourished children in Somalia, but could not ensure transportation for another approved shipping of 123,888 boxes for acute malnutrities in Sudan. Salem says he has no idea why. Hundreds of thousands of food boxes from the two restored orders of the two companies have not yet left in the United States, “ we need the product to leave the factories later than four months ” after it is manufactured, Salem told me, to secure at least a year of life when I arrive in Africa or Asia. She does not know who to call, to USAID or to the State Department, to do it, she told me.
On April 10, Moore received another email from the same USAID staff, who said his team seeks approval to send the pasta that has already been manufactured, but to the original planned recipients, then somewhere. “We are not sure of the time line for this approval,” the staff wrote. “But please know that we are trying to ensure that there is no basic products.”
Although the pasta makes it abroad before it expires, it may not become the hands of children. Save the Children, one of the leading distributors of Unicef, usually provides emergency therapeutic foods in clinics where mothers can also give birth and take their babies for health projections. But the organization has been forced to stop its work in about 1,000 clinics since Trump in January in January due to North -American funding, which its administration eliminated or failed to renew, Emily Byers, CEO of the organization, told me.
In a statement, UNICEF told me that the Trump administration has not yet reported the organization of canceled orders. UNICEF projects that 7 million children will require treatment for extreme malnutrition by 2025. Even before USAID cuts had a budget to treat only 4.2 million. Mana and Edesia normally provide 10 to 20 percent of UNICEF and USAID annual therapeutic foods and use half of its global funding for nutritional treatment and famine prevention services. “Today we have no visibility about the future funding of the United States Government,” the statement is called. Usually, producers are half a year old to fill in an order as large as the United States canceled, according to Odile Caron, a specialist in the food of Doctors without Borders. UNICEF needs this food in much less time. If malnourished children have no access to emergency therapeutic foods due to the decisions of the United States government, “ in three months, half of them will be dead and the rest will have terrible disabled, especially neurocognitive, ” said Manary, who also performed the first clinical trials on Plumpy’nut.
Since the dissolution of USAID began in January, the Trump administration has insisted that foreign help will be allowed. Yesterday, a spokesman for the State Department said to journalists: “We know we are a country with incredible resources. We know it. And we have incredible responsibilities and we don’t move away from them.” The White House did not answer my questions about the discrepancy between this feeling and the orders that the administration canceled or the State Department. USAID, DOGE and Musk did not respond to comments applications. According to NPR, a program was recently saved in Syria that hoped that mothers and young children said that their contract was saved from the ongoing cuts of the Government. But a separate contract that funds the program staff was terminated, leaving anyone to do the job. In the meantime, everything that the paste continues to accumulate in the Moore warehouse.
During the first meeting of the Trump Cabinet, in February, Musk acknowledged that the tear of Doo’s foreign assistance had been hasty, and then he promised that “when we make mistakes, we would solve it very quickly.” But the White House seems to have done nothing yet to solve this problem. Instead, two North -American companies that make a product that dead children need to survive is kept in Purgatory. As Moore reminded me of all our conversation, he has hundreds of thousands of boxes of pasta full and ready for distribution. This means that one of the two things happens later: “will be sent or destroyed.”
#months #dead
Image Source : www.theatlantic.com