LISTEN: Mana Nutrition in Fitzgerald, Ga., still makes pocket-sized packs of a fortified, sweetened peanut butter can mean the difference between life and death for a malnourished child. But a little over a year ago, its primary customer, USAID, was gutted. What's happening now? GPB's Grant Blankenship explores.
FITZGERALD, Ga — The production line at Mana Nutrition in Fitzgerald, Ga., population about 8,000, chugged along on a day in May as company compliance officer Andrea Hines led a tour of dignitaries, from near and far.
"We have an expansion that we'll walk past," Hines told the group comprising Georgia farmers, local elected officials, and members of the Trump administration. "Once that expansion is fully operational and commissioned, we'll only be able to hold two days' worth of production here."
"Our goal is to ship as quick as we possibly can," Hines concluded.
Shipping what Mana makes as quickly as they can produce it became a problem a little over a year ago, when its primary customer, USAID, was gutted by the administration.
Hines pointed to cardboard cases sliding by on a conveyor belt in the shiny new factory expansion.
"Each case represents two-and-a-half lives that will be saved," she explained.
For a malnourished child, three pocket-sized packs a day for six weeks of what’s like a fortified, sweetened peanut butter can mean the difference between life and death.
In the old part of the factory, cases of this ready-to-use therapeutic food, or RUTF, were stacked below the huge American flag hanging from the rafters.
In fact, Hines said this is the world’s largest RUTF stockpile.
“It's such a small manufacturing site, that it's wild to think that this is the largest,” she said.
Edesia Nutrition in Rhode Island also lays claim to that title. A representative from that factory was on the tour, too. But together with this stockpile in Fitzgerald, they mean the U.S. is the largest producer of RUTF, most of it made from Georgia peanuts. The stockpiles exist because the decades-long international supply chain that sent RUTF around the world was upended after USAID’s dismantling.
Now, while Mana and Edesia are looking for new channels of delivery, federal officials suggest the government may be looking for favors in return for feeding starving children.
That was explained before the big factory tour when the dignitaries were treated to lunch downtown. There, in a loft apartment renovated and owned by Mana, they heard from the guest of honor: Alabama native Lynda Blanchard.
Blanchard and her husband have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to President Donald Trump's campaigns in the past. She was ambassador to Slovenia in the first Trump administration. Now she is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations’ World Food Program, based in Rome, Italy.
At the luncheon, she explained the president’s take on humanitarian aid.
"Now, this president’s doing it bigger and better," Blanchard began.
With changes to the system, she went on to explain.
"Instead of it's continual aid without showing something and raising these countries up, it's more humanitarian trade," Blanchard said.
Or, as some state department documents call it: “Commercial Diplomacy.”
Blanchard explained the new ethos has a home in the Bureau of Disaster and Human Response (DHR), the arm of the Department of State created to replace USAID.
"We've seen the USAID is gone, and it's gone for a good reason," Blanchard told the lunch crowd. "They did not spend the money like we would spend the money in our household. Hence this new president has changed U.S. aid into U.S. trade. It is how we would all run our homes."
DHR only has about an eighth of the funding of the former USAID.
Blanchard explained emergency food aid will flow to countries from DHR when the country has something to offer the United States in return.
"Because in some of the countries that we've worked in for years, and continue to feed, we don't see progress," she said.
Blanchard told the group: Progress could mean countries dealing with their own internal security issues. If they don’t or can’t, she says other nations are free to offer them help.
This idea of commercial diplomacy doesn’t sit well with Jeannette Bailey, who leads the Global Nutrition Program with the International Rescue Committee. The IRC is one of the many non-governmental organizations which had worked historically with USAID to get emergency nutrition where it needed to be.
"What we don't need are more strings attached types of programs," Bailey said.
Bailey said one irony of the breakdown of the old RUTF delivery system is that because people like her haven’t been able to work in the countries where they have in the past, they haven’t been able to compile accurate mortality data. They are left making educated guesses at the harm done by USAID cuts.
But research published in the medical journal The Lancet estimates 163,000 more children could die annually as a result of the end of USAID.
"We need to be real about the fact that children are dying due to aid cuts," Bailey said.
That's why people behind the factories that produce RUTF are looking for new ways to move their product, with or without the federal government.
"Our ultimate need is getting these life-saving foods to children when they need them — which is now, right?" asked Maria Kasparian of Edesia Nutrition. "The need didn’t stop."
For now, both Edesia and Mana are seeing what help is left from private philanthropy. Mana has also pivoted to selling their own branded peanut butter to help make up their budget shortfalls and to keep the production lines churning.
They have sold 2 million jars so far.
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