The Kind of Entrepreneurship That Makes America Great

Not trading paper fortunes over the ether, not buying up an entire industry and firing all the workers, not finding new ways to screw working people out of their wages.

No, this real American entrepreneur identified a crying need and set out to satisfy it. A real American entrepreneur, by the way, who is non-white, non-male and probably non-Christian.

As Navyn Salem starts up the machines for the first time at her factory in Providence, R.I., this month, she has all the anxieties of any new business owner: whether the equipment will work, who will buy her products, how to cover her employees' benefits, and how to raise the profile of Edesia, the food-manufacturing producer she's launching. To that list, add a few more unconventional ones: how to make Edesia the first successful nonprofit provider of ready-to-use therapeutic (RUTF) food aid in the United States, how to revolutionize treatment of childhood malnutrition, and how to transform decades of counterproductive U.S. humanitarian aid policies, which place fiercely protectionist requirements on the food products that can be sent abroad during emergencies.

It's a tall order, but then again, Salem's factory isn't manufacturing just anything. Plumpy'nut, a squeezable package of fortified peanut-butter-based paste—no bigger than a granola bar—is used to feed severely malnourished children and pregnant or lactating women. Since Nutriset, the French company she teamed up with, created Plumpy'nut a decade ago, aid groups have hailed the Plumpy products as revolutionary and carted the packets around the world in droves—with good reason: the paste can bring an emaciated child on the brink of starvation back to life in just four to six weeks, eliminating or reducing the need for a costly stay at an emergency feeding center. Plumpy'nut doesn't require cooking, nor does it spoil if left for several months in tropical conditions. And unlike fortified-milk powders, Plumpy products don't need to be mixed with water, which is often unavailable or contaminated in famine situations. The results have been remarkable: in one trial distribution in Niger five years ago, the mortality rate among severely malnourished children plummeted from between 30 and 35 percent (the data is imprecise) down to just 5 percent.

There's just one problem: while the United States is the largest donor of food aid in the world, spending some $2 billion on it each year, practically none of that money has been allowed to go toward the miracle foods—by law. Statutes in the U.S. farm bill require that food-aid money be spent on food grown in the U.S., while at least half of it must be packaged in the U.S. and most of it must be transported by U.S. shippers. So while RUTFs are now manufactured on the cheap in dozens of developing countries like Niger, Ethiopia, South Africa, the Dominican Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, right nearby where they eventually need to be distributed, U.S. food aid still comes in the form of imports from afar. For one thing, it's incredibly inefficient: about 65 cents of every dollar that USAID's Food for Peace, the largest aid program, spends on food aid ends up going to overhead as a result (that's $600 million that could be saved each year through local purchase, according to the Government Accountability Office). What makes it practically farcical is the fact that those exports come primarily from the biggest U.S. commodities—wheat, soy, and corn—which don't have the nutrients needed to treat malnourished kids. RUTFs do. But the law is clear, and USAID couldn't fund their purchases.

Enter Salem.

Read the whole thing.

Doing well by doing good and pissing in the face of the protectionists, the racists and the bumbling bureaucrats with one simple entrepreneurial "Well if you fuckers won't get it done, I will."