Mark Moore is the co-founder & CEO of Mana Nutrition, an organization that produces nutritional peanut paste distributed to children experiencing malnutrition. Mana now employs roughly 130 people and has a production plant located in Fitzgerald, Georgia.

By and large, USAID has been Mana’s largest customer. But since the start of the year, it’s been “a kind of a yo-yo effect,” Moore told Marketpace’s Nancy Marshall-Genzer last month.

Back in January, Moore was informed that his contracts with USAID were on pause. Then, they were unpaused, then abruptly canceled before finally being restarted. The government currently owes him north of $20 million.

Moore spoke extensively with Marketplace’s Nancy Marshall-Genzer in late March about Mana, how the organization is faring amid the confusing back-and-forth status of USAID contracts, what the costs and benefits of life-saving peanut paste are, as well as what could happen if supply lines are disrupted this summer. USAID funding for Mana’s shippers and distributors has been cut.

The following are selected comments from Moore’s extended interview:

We make ready-to-use therapeutic food. It is a peanut paste that is fortified with micronutrients and milk powder. Essentially, it’s an infant formula that’s stabilized in the peanut paste, so it doesn’t have to be reconstituted where you might not have quality water. And it has a long shelf life — it has a two-year shelf life.

We serve, gosh, all over Africa. But from Central and East Africa, [we serve] the Sahel region — Chad, Sudan, South Sudan (the northern part of that), all the way across to Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria.

You eat it straight out of the packet — pull that little corner off and squeeze it into the mouth. So a mom can be taught in minutes to feed their child, and the child doesn’t have to be put into a clinical setting. That’s another big win. It’s really expensive to check kids into a clinical setting, and MANA stands for mother-administered nutritive aid.

It’s targeted for kids under six. It’s formulated for brain growth and for the important kind of neurological pathway stuff that’s going on in a kid’s brain. If we miss that window, then it’s too late. If you miss those early years, then there’s no way to catch up.

A box [of therapeutic food packets] is about $40, and that has 150 sachets. We’re not making a dollar a box. For us, break-even is a success because then we can keep going.

We make about 4,000 boxes, so half a million packets a day — 600,000. And really, we just expanded too to where we’ll be making 4x that. So we have a brand new factory. We’ve invested a couple hundred million dollars — philanthropic dollars — in lowering the price. When we started in 2010, one box was $57, something like that. And today, that box is around $42. So, in real dollars, it should be $80-some. We’ve essentially lowered the price by half. We’re feeding twice as many kids. So it’s a pretty cool story, and we’re scaling more. The future is bright, if we can keep the U.S. from bailing on their partnerships.

There’s supply and demand and all of these forces happening that we talk about in our economics classes. And in this case, you have a massive demand, right? You have children that are severely, acutely malnourished — if you want to call that a demand — but these are children that don’t have the resources to purchase it. So that means humanitarian efforts have to step in, notice the child waving their arm in the marketplace saying, “I really need this.” In their case, if they don’t get it, they’re not going to survive. So it’s incumbent upon us, as a government and as just — I don’t know — a human family, to say, “This is one place where the marketplace really doesn’t seem to be working well, and we’re going to step in and provide this food for these kids.”

We were last paid — I have to laugh, because that’s the depressing part — I think it was Dec. 10 or 15, or something like that was the last time we got a significant payment from the system. They owe us what we bill them — when we ship, we bill them. So that’s closing in on $20 million. But we have a bunch more that we’ve actually made that we still are waiting to get picked up that we will then bill them for. So somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million to $25 million is what the government owes us at this point, if you count actual invoices and then what we have stacked up that we’re waiting to ship. I can’t take the proverbial toothpaste back out of the tube, right? It’s in a packet that says “gift of the American people,” so those have to go. I can’t squeeze it out and put it in a different packet.

[Business from USAID] is still at 90% and we’re hoping to, if we can, find other sources, but that’s hard. Who are those other sources? Who’s going to spend $50 million a year buying this stuff in the marketplace where these kids don’t have any money? A lot of these customers don’t have ongoing budgets, so we might raise it this time — “we’re just hoping to get the money together.” It’s not a great plan going forward, but it’s the best we can do for emergency scenarios.

We are making a product, producing it, adding value, using American inputs. American farmers are benefiting. These dollars are not leaving America. They’re going to South Georgia. They’re buying peanuts from farmers. They’re buying milk from dairy in Wisconsin, packaging from a great group in Indiana. So, to cut it — you would imagine that it’s not “America first” to cut these programs.

We’re not trying to feed the whole world. We’re just trying to ask these strategic questions: Where are these kids wasted? Where are they likely to die? That’s where we need to get it. Kids who are severely, acutely malnourished aren’t hungry. They’ve ceased to be hungry because their bodies have such deficiencies. So, you can’t miss a week. You have to step in. And if you or I or any adult misses a week, there’s weight loss involved, but for a child under six — especially these children — it’ll cost them their life if we don’t act.