Food rations that could supply 3.5 million people for a month are mouldering in warehouses around the world because of U.S. aid cuts and risk becoming unusable, according to five people familiar with the situation.
The food stocks have been stuck inside 4 U.S. government warehouses since the Trump administration’s decision in January to cut global aid programmes, according to three people who previously worked at the U.S. 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.
The purpose of these aid programs is cynical: they are to create exactly this kind of dependency. It is why food sovereignty is considered a threat and is actively undermined by the IMF.
What we are seeing is what threat is being made when a country is made dependent on “aid”: starvation. Same as in Gaza. This is the calculus the US and its cronies force upon the global south: submit to insecurity and become a dependency or try to go your own path and become villified and a target to be destroyed.
The former path is guaranteed death and suffering, which is why nations led by those with a coherent political program choose the latter and invest in food sovereignty as an anti-imperialist measure.