USAID cuts threaten ‘God’s food’ made in Georgia for children in need

Reaching into one of the giant white sacks piled up in his Georgia food-processing plant, Mark Moore pulls out a fistful of shelled peanuts, what he calls “God's food”, and lets them roll through his fingers.

A former evangelical missionary, Moore is co-founder of Mana Nutrition, a US nonprofit that said it has fed 10-million children across the globe since 2010 with packets of peanut butter paste made in the small farming community of Fitzgerald, about 290km south of Atlanta.

“This saves children,” said Moore, 58, clutching a bunch of the protein-rich legumes.

“It's not an overstatement: We defeat death.”

Mana is in the midst of its own struggle for survival. Deep cuts in federal programmes targeting international aid programmes under President Donald Trump have threatened to choke the financial lifeline that has allowed the nonprofit to carry out its life-saving mission.

Since January, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), created during the height of the Cold War by then-President John F Kennedy, has been dismantled by the department of government efficiency, Trump's cost-cutting entity led until recently by billionaire Elon Musk.

In announcing the termination of its contracts, which accounted for about 90% of Mana's $100m (R1.7bn) annual budget, the department of government efficiency sent a letter to the nonprofit saying its work was “not aligned with agency priorities”. Efforts to reach a spokesperson for the state department, which oversees USAID, have been unsuccessful.

In two terse letters sent to Mana and reviewed by Reuters, USAID offered no specific reasons for the terminations other than to say the work “was not in the national interest”.

Mana has enough money to keep running through to August at the most, Moore said, but he seemed unshakeable in his optimism about the future of its mission.

He has vowed to keep his factory going and his 130 workers employed, even as the Trump administration has slashed 90% of USAID contracts and $60bn in US assistance across the board.

One possibility is finding another international aid organisation to support the manufacture and distribution of Mana's peanut paste packets, each about the size of a cellphone. Most of the product, which also includes powdered milk, sugar and vitamins, goes to Africa, where Moore served as a missionary in Uganda for 10 years.

“It saves children who are at the brink of no return,” said Mark Manary, an expert in childhood nutrition at Washington University's Institute for Public Health who helped develop the paste's formula.

“It's hard to wrap your mind around the need.”

Manary said the food created in Georgia and at a similar operation in Rhode Island, Edesia Nutrition, is an important link in the global effort to stave off starvation of children in countries where the main killer is malnutrition.

Moore hopes legislators and the Trump administration will see the value in the work and put the money back into the new federal budget.

“I believe the US government will remain involved in global food aid,” he said, adding he has spoken to Republicans and Democrats who want the work to continue.

Moore is also seeking contracts with other organisations that specialise in humanitarian aid for children in crisis, including Save the Children, International Rescue Committee and Unicef. The organisations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

One bright spot in recent years was an infusion of cash from Chris Hohn, a hedge-fund billionaire based in London and a philanthropist with the Children's Investment Fund Foundation. Hohn's charity did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In recent years, Hohn has given more than $250m to Mana Nutrition, according to Moore, much of it spent on expanding the plant, more than doubling its space and adding new machinery.

However, Mana needs new contracts to go forward, or another donation from philanthropists.

“We've been put on Earth for a purpose,” Moore said.

“Jesus told his disciples to go and feed the people. So we've been hustling nonstop.”

Reuters