According to Mana and Edesia, however, that was only the start of the story. The contracts reinstated in February applied to old orders for emergency therapeutic food that Mana and Edesia were already in the middle of fulfilling. But two weeks ago, without any fanfare, the Trump administration then canceled all of its upcoming orders—that is, everything beyond those old orders that were previously reinstated—according to emails obtained by The Atlantic. The move reneged on an agreement to provide about 3 million children with emergency paste over approximately the next year. What’s more, according to the two companies, the administration has also not awarded separate contracts to shipping companies, leaving much of the food assured by the original reinstated contracts stuck in the United States.
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The Trump administration has broken every step of that system. According to Mana CEO Mark Moore and Edesia CEO Navyn Salem, USAID agreed back in October to buy more than 1 million boxes of therapeutic food. The World Food Programme and UNICEF planned to distribute the contents of this order as early as March, according to an email obtained by The Atlantic. But on April 4, both Edesia and Mana received an email from a staffer at the State Department that said the plans for 10 countries to receive the emergency paste would not move forward. (Those countries: Bangladesh, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen, to which the U.S. has separately canceled all humanitarian aid.)
When I spoke with Moore, he panned his phone across the production floor to show me boxes upon boxes of peanut paste piled against the walls. Moore told me he is terrified for the children who will die without the paste. Without it, he said, “they’re trapped. Just trapped.” He is also worried for the Americans who rely on his business for their own livelihoods. “All we’re doing is cutting farmers and hurting kids. That just seems like a terrible plan to me,” he said. Meanwhile, Edesia, which had stopped its production for the first time in more than a decade after the first cancellation notice, is now making just 2,000 Plumpy’Nut packets a day instead of the usual 10,000, Salem said.
Moore and Salem both told me that even if USAID had not canceled the order itself, they have no idea how they would have shipped it. As far as they know, the U.S. government has failed to award many expected contracts to the shipping companies that Moore and Salem have long used to send their emergency food products overseas. This month, Salem said, Edesia was able to ship 42,000 boxes of emergency food for moderately malnourished kids 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 clue why. Hundreds of thousands of boxes of food from both companies’ old, reinstated orders still have not left the U.S. “We need product to leave the factories at no later than four months” after it is manufactured, Salem told me, to ensure at least a year of shelf life when it arrives in Africa or Asia. She does not know who to call, at USAID or the State Department, to make that happen, she told me.
Archive link (I think this is important enough tro bypass their firewall) :
https://archive.ph/wUllv 
= new reply since forum marked as read
