USAID cuts threaten ‘God's food' made in Georgia for children in need
A former evangelical missionary, Moore is co-founder of Mana Nutrition, a US nonprofit that said 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, 58, clutching a bunch of the protein-rich legumes.
'It's not an overstatement: We defeat death.'
Mana is in the midst of its own struggle for survival. Deep cuts in federal programmes targeting international aid programmes under President Donald Trump have threatened to choke the financial lifeline that has allowed the nonprofit to carry out its life-saving mission.
Since January, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), created during the height of the Cold War by then-President John F Kennedy, has been dismantled by the department of government efficiency, Trump's cost-cutting entity led until recently by billionaire Elon Musk.
In announcing the termination of its contracts, which accounted for about 90% of Mana's $100m (R1.7bn) annual budget, the department of government efficiency sent a letter to the nonprofit saying its work was 'not aligned with agency priorities'. Efforts to reach a spokesperson for the state department, which oversees USAID, have been unsuccessful.
In two terse letters sent to Mana and reviewed by Reuters, USAID offered no specific reasons for the terminations other than to say the work 'was not in the national interest'.
Mana has enough money to keep running through to August at the most, Moore said, but he seemed unshakeable in his optimism about the future of its mission.
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