Food & Climate
Donald Trump put US food aid for many countries at risk of spoilage as it sits in ports, ships and warehouses after pausing funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), what is the story?
Trump’s funding cut for the U.S. Agency, put $500 million in food at risk of spoiling, according to a Feb. 10 report from a government watchdog.
USAID provides humanitarian aid to more than 100 countries and buys food directly from U.S. farmers and manufacturers, according a to a report seen by “Food & Climate” platform.
The report from USAID’s inspector general highlighted the risks of “safeguarding and distribution” of $8.2 billion in unspent humanitarian aid after the Trump administration ordered almost all staff to be placed on leave and ordered a review of U.S. foreign assistance programs.
The agency buys food aid goods directly from U.S. farmers and processors, whose contributions account for about 40% of total international food aid, according to a 2021 report by the Congressional Research Service. With the agency’s funding cut, farmers are concerned about the market for some of their products, including sorghum producers in Kansas, according to the Topeka Capital Journal.
US food aid sitting at ports
While the future of USAID’s funding and its purchases from U.S. farmers remains unclear, there is currently $489 million worth of American food aid sitting “at ports, in transit, and in warehouses at risk of spoilage, unanticipated storage needs, and diversion,” the Feb. 10 USAID inspector general report said.
An additional 500,000 additional metric tons of food is currently on ships or ready to be shipped abroad, the report added. USAID typically buys commodities such as wheat, soybeans, sorghum and split peas from U.S. farmers.
“When the food doesn’t get to where it needs to go, it winds up in a landfill, and that has devastating effects,” Ashley Stanley, the CEO of Spoonfuls, which redirects excess food from grocers and other companies to aid organizations in Massachusetts, told CBS Boston.
The Trump administration has targeted USAID as President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, seek to cut the size of the federal government. Musk has said the agency should be shut down, calling it “beyond repair”.
USAID targets
The future of the agency, established in 1961 to combat poverty, strengthen democracy and protect human rights and global health, is now uncertain. On Friday, a federal judge prevented the Trump administration from placing 2,200 USAID employees on administrative leave,
The Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the largest humanitarian groups, called the U.S. cutoff the most devastating of any in its 79-year history. It said Monday that it will have to suspend programs serving hundreds of thousands of people in 20 countries.
“The impact of this will be felt severely by the most vulnerable, from deeply neglected Burkina Faso, where we are the only organization supplying clean water to the 300,000 trapped in the blockaded city of Djibo, to war-torn Sudan, where we support nearly 500 bakeries in Darfur providing daily subsidized bread to hundreds of thousands of hunger-stricken people,” the group said in a statement.
But this is about more than just supporting the world’s poor with US food aid because the farmers aren’t federal employees but they do play a big role in some of the federal programs Trump is taking aim at, particularly in the US Agency for International Development or USAID.
Some of those programs, including Food for Peace, purchase around 2 billion of dollars in US commodities like grain to help communities across the globe.
That means not only are folks getting fed, our farmers are getting paid.
“Be it feeding populations at a refugee camp where there might be longer term needs but also working to respond to disasters as they might arise,” said Jake Westlin, Vice President of Policy at the National Association of Wheat Growers.
But with a freeze on federal spending came a freeze on purchases for those programs leaving millions of dollars in wheat in limbo.
“I think we saw just over 200,000 tons of metric wheat that is valued at $65 million dollars that was paused from being purchased,” said Westlin, according to “3 News Now“.