Reducing spoilage in food aid shipments

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) ships out food aid worth more than $1 billion every year—over a million tons of grains, soybeans, and other staples sent to dozens of countries around the world. Even though the agency estimates that only about 1 percent of that food is lost to spoilage, that’s still over 10 million dollars’ worth of food annually that never gets to needy people’s plates. And some within-nation food procurement suffers even higher losses.