Africa-focused US food project on brink amid aid cuts

Fitzgerald, Georgia — 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, which he calls “God’s food”, and lets them roll through his fingers.

A former evangelical missionary, Moore is co-founder of MANA Nutrition, a nonprofit that says 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, clutching a bunch of the protein-rich legumes. “It’s not an overstatement: we defeat death.”

But MANA is now in its own struggle for survival. The Trump administration’s deep cuts in federal programmes targeting international aid projects have threatened to choke off the financial lifeline that has allowed the nonprofit to carry out its life-saving mission.

Doge cuts

Since January, the USAID, which was created during the height of the Cold War by then-president John F Kennedy, has all been but dismantled by the department of government efficiency, Trump’s cost-cutting entity led until recently by billionaire Elon Musk.

In February, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), said it was terminating MANA’s existing contracts, which accounted for about 90% of its $100m annual budget. Doge sent a letter to the nonprofit saying its work was “not aligned with agency priorities”.

But soon afterwards, USAID reversed course and restored those contracts. The state department now says it and USAID are working with MANA and Rhode Island’s Edesia Nutrition, which makes a similar product, to renew their government contracts, and that they are committed to working with their partners in delivering therapeutic food.

Without elaborating, a senior state department official said in an email that an additional $50m, or 1.4-million boxes of the paste, was approved from the two companies as recently as May 26.

Still, no new government contracts have been awarded to MANA in 2025, spokesperson Jon McDowell said in an email.

But he said the situation was “highly dynamic” and that MANA was committed to working with the government and USAID.

According to MANA, USAID has only one open request for bids on a contract. Under historical prices, the nonprofit said, such a contract would be worth roughly $17m to either MANA or Edesia, or divided between providers.

If MANA fails to pick up any new contracts, the nonprofit would have just enough cash on hand to keep running through to end-August at the most, Moore said.

Even so, he seems unshakeable in his optimism about the future of its mission, even as the Trump administration has slashed 90% of all USAID contracts and $60bn in US assistance across the board.

He has vowed to keep his 7,432m² factory going and his 130 workers employed.

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 Edesia’s operation is an important link in the global effort to stave off starvation of children in countries where the number one killer is malnutrition.

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 already spent on expanding the plant, more than doubling its space and adding new machinery.

But MANA needs new contracts to go forward, or another donation from philanthropists.

Reuters