Wheat grows so prodigiously here on the Kansas high plains that in 1953 the surplus birthed one of the Cold War’s big ideas: Food for Peace, a federal government program that delivered the excess bounty to a hungry postwar world.
Conceived by a Kansas farmer and created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Food for Peace has sent burlap sacks of grain stamped “From the American People” to more than four billion people in 150 countries around the world.
Now it is effectively dead.
The program was administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Elon Musk fed “into the wood chipper” on a weekend in February. Kansas’s Republican lawmakers tried to save it but failed to persuade President Trump, who last month proposed cutting the entire 2026 budget for Food for Peace as well as another food aid program dear to Kansans, the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition program.
The Trump administration said the programs were inefficient and wasteful, “with dubious results.”
It was the latest blow to farmers, particularly in Kansas, where about 80 percent of those on the high plains voted for Mr. Trump and agriculture makes up almost half of the state’s economy. The president’s whipsawing tariffs and cuts to agriculture grants and global food aid have left the state with swollen silos, shrinking markets and volatile prices for crops.
Last year Kansas sold half its annual wheat crop abroad, but those buyers have mostly dried up. At least one big grain broker is now trying to sell Kansas grain that once fed people overseas for use in dog food.
Paul Penner, a Kansas wheat farmer and former president of the National Association of Wheat Growers, is frustrated that there have not been more objections to the administration from wheat growers and the state’s largely Republican congressional delegation.
“We need people who are willing to speak up,” he said. “I think privately they say things, but publicly, no. And I’m not sure what their pain threshold is.”
‘A Good Soldier in the World’
The United States enjoyed a period of such abundance after World War II that agricultural surplus became a major problem. Crop prices plunged, storage costs soared and grain spoiled. But people in Europe, Asia and Africa, who were still recovering from the wartime devastation to agriculture and industry, struggled to feed themselves.
Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II and the grandson of a Kansas farmer, asked his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and agriculture secretary, Ezra Taft Benson, to work with Congress on a solution. It came in the form of a law he signed in 1954 that enabled needy “friendly countries” to buy American farm products in their local currencies. The United States spent the proceeds inside those countries on development grants.
Eisenhower called it “Food for Peace,” a name formally adopted a few years later.
The program distributed $76 million in agricultural products in its first six months to Bolivia, Germany, Haiti, Honduras, Italy, Libya, Nepal, Pakistan, Yugoslavia and Vietnam, according to records in the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan. Half of the shipments were of wheat and wheat flour. The program was a hit at home: In 1963 the United States issued a Food for Peace postage stamp, emblazoned with the slogan “Freedom from Hunger.”
“He meant it when he said ‘Food for Peace’— it was a way of being a good soldier in the world,” Mary Jean Eisenhower, one of the president’s granddaughters, said in an interview. “I think it was a beautiful program, and I just found it very disturbing when it got caught into the political …” She trailed off, reluctant to discuss politics.
The administration’s moves against Food for Peace and the McGovern-Dole program pose a dilemma for the Republicans in Kansas’s congressional delegation. How can they save them without crossing the president? Senator Jerry Moran, Senator Roger Marshall and Representative Tracey Mann tried to save Food for Peace by moving it to the Agriculture Department, but the bills have never made it to a vote.
Mr. Mann did not respond to requests for comment, although Mr. Moran’s office sent a link to a Senate hearing last month in which Mr. Moran asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the two programs’ survival and called them “critical tools in the fight against global hunger.’’ Mr. Rubio expressed support for the programs but offered no solution on saving them.
Mr. Marshall told constituents in a town hall in March that Food for Peace was “near and dear to my heart,” but claimed without evidence that only a “small fraction” of the aid reached hungry people. His office later supplied several links related to U.S.A.I.D., including 2016 testimony by its inspector general titled “Fraud Investigations Expose Weaknesses in Syria Humanitarian Aid Programs.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Marshall, Payton Fuller, said the senator wanted to work with the Trump administration to send Kansas grain around the world in potential new trade deals with China and India.
An Angry Plains Farmer
Vance and Louise Ehmke are the proprietors of Ehmke Seed, a 14,000-acre operation near Healy, in the heart of the high plains. The Ehmkes, both 76, grow wheat, but their main business is selling farmers varieties of grain better suited to Kansas conditions.
A tour of their operation reveals the problems caused by Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump. Researchers from the federal government and Kansas State University who test strains of virus-resistant wheat on their farm have had their staff slashed and activities curtailed, hampering efforts across the state to combat crop blight.
Wheat prices have fallen by nearly $1.50 per bushel since February, well below the price farmers need to break even. “I would lay a huge amount of that right at the feet of Donald J. Trump,” Mr. Ehmke said.
“For a small farm that’s got a thousand acres of wheat with a modest yield of 45 bushels an acre and you lose a dollar a bushel, that’s $45,000 of income that has just flat-ass vanished,” Mr. Ehmke said.
The past several years have been difficult for Kansas farmers battered by drought, escalating machinery and supply prices and steeper competition from overseas.
Mr. Ehmke is a registered Republican, and says that for a Kansas farmer, “changing how you vote is, honest to God, like changing your religion.” But America’s farm sector is already shrinking, and he says Mr. Trump’s moves are bringing that bleak future to pass “a hell of a lot quicker. So I am pissed at him.”
Mrs. Ehmke is a Democrat. She attended Mr. Marshall’s town hall in March and asked what he would do to save Food for Peace.
Mr. Marshall echoed Mr. Musk’s claims that U.S.A.I.D. was rife with “waste, fraud and abuse” and said that “we were sending food over to these foreign countries and corrupt governments and criminals and warlords were stealing it.” The crowd jeered.
Mr. Marshall’s answer incensed Mrs. Ehmke. “Show me the data, Roger Marshall, about waste, fraud, abuse and warlords,” she said. “This is my living at stake here. What is your plan?”
Nick Levendofsky, the executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union, has been lobbying to preserve the food programs, but when he speaks publicly he often gets responses from people saying farmers’ troubles are their own fault.
“Trump’s tariffs badly injured Kansas farmers in his first term, and your members were stupid enough to vote for him again in 2020 and 2024,” read one letter he received from a descendant of Kansas farmers living in Florida. “Every farm bankruptcy that comes — and come they will — will be a direct consequence of your members voting for the guy who already hurt them once.”
In early May Mr. Levendofsky brought a delegation of Kansas Farmers Union members to Washington in a push to preserve the programs. The trip was disappointing. Their request for a meeting with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was denied. Ms. Rollins’s social media feed showed that on the day the Kansans visited her department she was meeting with Danica Patrick, the former NASCAR driver.
Later that day, they learned that Mr. Trump had recommended cutting all funding for Food for Peace and the McGovern-Dole program.
In the hallway of the Russell Senate Office Building, Tom Giessel, a retired farmer, sighed in disappointment. “These people really don’t know the story of Food for Peace and the roots of it,” he said.
“Farmers shipping grain to where people were hungry — that we did these kinds of things is really what made America great.”
Foreign Grain Sales of ‘Zero’
The Pawnee County Co-op in Larned, Kan., is owned by its farmers, and is one of the biggest brokers of high plains wheat. Before Mr. Trump took office in January, the co-op sold half its grain abroad, to European, Asian and African buyers. Now the co-op’s foreign sales are “zero,” said Kim Barnes, its chief financial officer.
The co-op was stuck with 1.5 million bushels of grain sorghum, also called milo, after Mr. Trump started his tariff war with China. Mr. Barnes worked his Rolodex for six weeks, seeking a buyer, but finally sold most of the milo, a grain popular in Asia and Africa, to two biofuels refiners and a swine producer for feed, because by that point it was cheaper to use than corn.
Plunging grain prices exert a brutal ripple effect on Kansas’s small towns, Mr. Barnes said. “When you have a million bushels down a dollar in cash, that’s $7 million leaving the area,” Mr. Barnes said, citing a Kansas State University study.
Mr. Barnes dug around on a desk where photos of his grandchildren shared space with three computer screens tracking commodities futures. He fished out a chart tracking the plunging price of milo, which is selling at a five-year low.
“I’d like to see the humanitarian side of it go on, because the need is still there,” he said. “But we’ve got to make our own future.”
This spring Mr. Barnes saw an ad in a crop science magazine for a pet food convention in Kansas City, Mo. He went, and returned with a fistful of business cards. He hopes to sell Kansas grain as dog food.
Elizabeth Williamson is a feature writer for The Times, based in Washington. She has been a journalist for three decades, on three continents.
Gabriela Bhaskar is a Times photographer correspondent based in Los Angeles.
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