The U.S. Department of Agriculture has halted 17 projects under a foreign aid program that funds school meals for children in low-income countries.
The cuts to the McGovern-Dole Food for Education thus add to 27 initiatives canceled last week under the USDA’s Food for Progress, which sends U.S. products abroad to aid economic development.
The measures, aggressively pushed by President Trump–intent on decreasing government spending–were taken because the plans in question were deemed “not in alignment with the foreign assistance objectives of the Trump Administration”.
Some of this foreign aid was for nations such as Honduras, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone and Nepal. At least 12 of the McGovern-Dole projects canceled this week are administered by Catholic Relief Services.
Haydee Diaz, CRS’s national representative in Honduras, said the group’s program provides assistance to 97,000 children in more than 1,700 schools in rural municipalities where malnutrition and growth retardation, caused by lack of adequate food, are part of the daily routine.
The program uses corn, flour, rice, beans, soybeans, and vegetable oil from the United States for school meals prepared by 10,000 volunteers.
According to the CRS, such aid also helps reduce migration to the U.S. because it provides parents in these rural communities with the assurance that their children will have at least one healthy meal a day. “What we’ll see is more desperation, and more migration,” Diaz said.
U.S. farmers have already received payment for the donated commodities: the recipients, now, must deliver them to their final destinations. According to another source familiar with the matter, the USDA has enjoined the beneficiaries to dispose of their products within 30 days. This could mean giving the food away or destroying it, the source added.
Despite the cuts, USDA is still administering the remaining 14 Food for Progress projects in 17 countries and 30 McGovern-Dole projects in 22 nations.
In 2023, the McGovern-Dole program fed 2.5 million food-insecure children. Project funding totaled $248 million and allowed more than 37,000 tons of U.S. food to be sent abroad.
Now, with last week’s cuts, more than 780,000 children in eleven countries around the world are at risk of having to go without their only daily meal.
