The effects of the Trump administration's rapid assault on the U.S. Agency for International Development have landed at the doorsteps of a Georgia peanut butter supplier in the heart of MAGA country.
Mana Nutrition, a nonprofit that employs over 100 workers who make peanut butter-based products for malnourished children across the world, said it received notice Thursday that $12 million worth of supply contracts had been terminated by USAID, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
And that could prove to be a substantial hit to the small rural South Georgia town of Fitzgerald, which sits inside a ruby red Trump county that voted overwhelmingly to return the MAGA leader to the White House in the November elections.
“The contract cancellations are a big deal, of course, because USAID is more than 90% of our business,” Mana’s cofounder and CEO Mark Moore told the publication Thursday. And there could be more USAID cancellations on the way, he added.
The USAID termination letter prepared on Feb. 26 told the peanut butter supplier the contracts are no longer “aligned with Agency priorities,” and claimed that “continuing this program is not in the national interest.”
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Moore, whose business in the roughly 150,000-square-foot manufacturing facility has rapidly accelerated over the last 15 years, said the cancelled contracts make up 35% of the company’s orders, the publication reported. The nonprofit said that’s enough to feed 300,000 children.
“We make these packets of peanut butter in Fitzgerald because it’s the best place in the world to make a packet of peanut butter,” Moore said.
The company produces “nutrient-dense food pouches containing milk, multivitamins and peanut butter," the outlet said. The canceled USAID contracts affect countries including South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and Madagascar,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Mana is still holding $23 million in USAID supply contracts that still don’t appear to have been canceled as of Thursday afternoon, the report said.
“Our assumption is they intended to cancel all our contracts, but for some reason they didn’t get around to it. We don’t know,” Moore told the publication. Meanwhile, Moore said he was still waiting for the government to cut the company a check for $20 million in packets already produced and shipped.
