Trump assault on USAID leaves plant that makes peanut butter for malnourished kids scrambling

MANA Nutrition makes a special kind of peanut butter paste that many humanitarian aid workers are familiar with. It is fortified with milk and essential vitamins, packed with calories and sent to severely malnourished children around the world, including some countries in Africa.

MANA Nutrition makes a special kind of peanut butter paste that many humanitarian aid workers are familiar with. It is fortified with milk and essential vitamins, packed with calories and sent to severely malnourished children around the world, including some countries in Africa. On Wednesday afternoon, Mark Moore, the CEO and co-founder of the Fitzgerald, Georgia-based plant, got word from the US Agency for International Development: MANA’s contracts with the agency were being canceled. CNN spoke with Moore just minutes after he said he received a series of contract termination letters from USAID. Still reeling, Moore described the furious scramble that the news had set off at his plant. One of his first orders of business: Asking his workers mid-production to immediately stop putting labels that say “USAID” on the pouches that the peanut butter paste is squirted into. “Every one of those packets has printing on it that says, ‘From the American people. USAID.’ And if… I don’t deliver it through USAID contracts, it’s trash. I can’t distribute it,” Moore said. “It’s not like I can squeeze that peanut butter back out of that packet and put it in a new packet. So it’s a problem. A huge problem.” His predicament is just one of the many aftershocks of the Trump administration’s rapid decimation of USAID, which has suffered more severely than almost any other agency across the government. Thousands of positions at the federal agency have been eliminated and the vast majority of its officials have been placed on leave. Contracts are being canceled left and right, leaving many in the humanitarian aid world reeling. In normal times, Moore’s plant produces 10 pouches of the lifesaving paste every second. Each small bag contains 500 calories’ worth of the special peanut butter — which does not require refrigeration or additional preparation — and is labeled “RUTF” for “Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food.”