Food rations sufficient for 3.5 million people for a month are rotting in warehouses globally due to U.S. aid cuts, sources said.
The food stocks have been stuck inside four 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.
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 U.S. government source as up to date.
Enough To Feed Gaza
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 U.N. body says that one tonne of food – typically including cereals, pulses and oil – can meet the daily needs 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.
According to the World Food Programme, 343 million people are facing acute levels of food insecurity worldwide. Of those, 1.9 million people are gripped by catastrophic hunger and on the brink of famine. Most of them are in Gaza and Sudan, but also in pockets of South Sudan, Haiti and Mali.
A spokesperson for the State Department, which oversees USAID, said in response to detailed questions about the food stocks that it was working to ensure the uninterrupted continuation of aid programs and their transfer by July as part of the USAID decommissioning process.
“USAID is continuously consulting with partners on where to best distribute commodities at USAID prepositioning warehouses for use in emergency programs ahead of their expiration dates,” the spokesperson said.
Some Food Likely To Be Destroyed
Although the Trump administration has issued waivers for some humanitarian programmes – including in Gaza and Sudan – the cancellation of contracts and freezing of funds needed to pay suppliers, shippers, and contractors have left food stocks stuck in the four warehouses, the sources said.
A proposal to hand the stocks to aid organisations that can distribute them is on hold, according to the U.S. source and two former USAID sources briefed on the proposal. The plan is awaiting approval from the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance, the two former USAID sources said.
The office is headed by Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old former operative of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, who is now overseeing the decommissioning of USAID.
The Office of Foreign Assistance, DOGE and Lewin himself did not respond to requests for comment.
Nearly 500 tonnes of high-energy biscuits stored at a USAID warehouse in Dubai are due to expire in July, according to a former USAID official and an aid official familiar with the inventories. The biscuits could feed at least 27,000 acutely malnourished children for a month, according to Reuters calculations.
The biscuits are now likely to be destroyed or turned into animal feed, the former USAID official said, adding that in a typical year, only around 20 tonnes of food might be disposed of in this way because of damage in transit or storage.
Some of those stocks were previously intended for Gaza and famine-stricken Sudan, the former official said.
The State Department spokesperson did not directly respond to questions on how much of the food aid in storage was close to expiry and whether this would be destroyed.
USAID plans to fire almost all of its staff in two rounds on July 1 and Sept. 2, as it prepares to shut down, according to a notification submitted to Congress in March. The two former USAID sources said many of the critical staff needed to manage the warehouses or move the supplies will depart in July.
(With inputs from Reuters)
