Food rations that could supply 3.5 million people for a month are mouldering in warehouses around the world because of US aid cuts and risk becoming unusable, according to five people familiar with the situation.
The food stocks have been stuck inside four US government warehouses since the Trump administration’s decision in January to cut global aid programmes, according to three people who previously worked at the US Agency for International Development and two sources from other aid organisations.
Some stocks that are due to expire as early as July are likely to be destroyed, either by incineration, using them as animal feed or disposing of them in other ways, two of the sources said.
The warehouses, which are run by USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), contain between 60,000 to 66,000 metric tonnes of food, sourced from American farmers and manufacturers, the five people said.
An undated inventory list for the warehouses – which are located in Djibouti, South Africa, Dubai and Houston – stated that they contained more than 66,000 tonnes of commodities, including high-energy biscuits, vegetable oil and fortified grains.
Those supplies are valued at over $98 million, according to the document reviewed by Reuters, which was shared by an aid official and verified by a US government source as up to date.
That food could feed over a million people for three months, or the entire population of Gaza for a month and a half, according to a Reuters analysis using figures from the World Food Programme, the world’s largest humanitarian agency.
The UN body says that one tonne of food – typically including cereals, pulses and oil – can meet the daily need of approximately 1,660 people.
The dismantling of USAID and cuts to humanitarian aid spending by President Donald Trump come as global hunger levels are rising due to conflict and climate change, which are driving more people toward famine, undoing decades of progress.
