[Source: Reuters]

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 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.

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.

Stream the best of Fiji on VITI+. Anytime. Anywhere.