Updated August 20, 2025 at 8:08 AM MDT
Navyn Salem cried when she got a call last week — but they were happy tears.
They were sparked by a message from the U.S. State Department: After months of confusion from stop-work orders, contract terminations and foreign aid cuts, the federal government is ready to restart ordering therapeutic food designed to bring malnourished children back from the brink.
"Someone brought me my phone and said, 'Look at what message just came in,'" she recalled in an interview with NPR. "It was our first order [from the U.S. government] for 2025."
Salem is the founder and CEO of Edesia Nutrition, which buys raw materials like soy, peanuts and powdered milk from U.S. farmers and then, in its Rhode Island factory, processes the ingredients into packets of Plumpy'Nut. Each packet contains a peanut butter-y paste, a type of ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) that has become a key tool in worldwide efforts to address famine.
In a typical year, the factory provides a full eight-week treatment to 5 million children in some 25 countries, and often in war zones and during humanitarian crises. But lately, those boxes full of Plumpy'Nut have been grounded in the warehouse as a result of President Trump's cuts to foreign assistance.
"It is tragic," Salem told NPR in February when looking at the boxes.
Now the U.S. government, which used to be her biggest client, is back, she says.
In a statement to NPR, the State Department confirmed that it will be spending $93 million on RUTF, working with UNICEF to transport and distribute it in a dozen African countries and in Haiti. It said this will be enough to help nearly a million children.
"We're just over the moon trying to process all of this good news, after lots and lots and lots of bad news," says Salem.
It's good news … but is it great news?
This is a welcome development for the countries slated to receive this aid: Haiti, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, South Sudan and Sudan.
Children who get access to RUTFs do much better than children who don't have access to this food. Independent researchers have found that the survival rate for severely malnourished kids was about 25% in the pre-Plumpy'Nut era — and that the use of RUTFs since 2001 has boosted that percentage to 80% to 90%.
And the news is a boost for the two U.S. companies that make RUTFs — Edesia Nutrition and a company based in Georgia called Mana Nutrition.
At Edesia, Salem says, she's rehiring six of the 16 staff members she had to lay off in the spring, and she's posting new job openings and adding a Saturday shift.
But some famine experts are greeting the development much more cautiously.
Caitlin Welsh — the director of the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies — says this news is not necessarily a game changer. But it is good news about the State Department's commitment to emergency humanitarian relief.
"It tells me: There's a pulse there — it's not totally dead. But no one should be confused into thinking that this is a long-term solution," she says. "And what we haven't seen yet out of the State Department is any indication that programs and funding that were meant to address long-term food security will be resumed."
For example, she points to programs that aim to boost local agriculture and make famine-prone communities more resilient to food crises. She says such efforts were hobbled by foreign aid cuts and have not been restarted.
Plus, by her estimation, the new commitment to purchasing and distributing RUTF represents less than half of what the U.S. spent last year on therapeutic food. And, she says, it's far less than what's needed. In the 13 countries the U.S. has designated as recipient countries, Welsh says, there are 24 million malnourished children, although, she adds, other countries and organizations are also contributing to the aid effort.
In the State Department's statement to NPR, it said that it's "finalizing additional funding" for nutrition programs.
Alex de Waal, who studies famines at Tufts University, says that since Trump's inauguration, the differential between what food aid is needed and what's provided has been growing.
"We've had just a catastrophic gap, and this is just the first step toward filling that gap," he says. "It's a baby step."
But at Edesia Nutrition, the news that the U.S. will resume ordering RUTF represents a big step forward. Those pallets full of boxes of Plumpy'Nut in the company's warehouse will soon be on their way to the malnourished children who need them.
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