Nearly 500 tonnes of high-energy biscuits meant to feed tens of thousands of malnourished children in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be incinerated after expiring in storage, a senior US official confirmed Wednesday.

The loss comes months after President Donald Trump abruptly closed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in January, halting shipments of emergency food and leaving supplies stranded in warehouses worldwide.

Deputy Secretary of State Michael Rigas, appearing before lawmakers, said he was “distressed” by the waste and acknowledged the spoiled biscuits were “a casualty of the shutdown of USAID.”

According to internal USAID memos dated May 5 and May 19, 496 tonnes of the energy-rich biscuits, worth about $793,000, expired this month after sitting in a Dubai warehouse.

The food, originally intended to feed an estimated 27,000 starving children, will now be sent to landfills or incinerated in the United Arab Emirates at an additional cost of roughly $100,000.

Aid officials managed to salvage 622 tonnes of the same biscuits in June, redirecting them to Syria, Bangladesh, and Myanmar before their use-by dates. But the remaining stock could not be moved in time.

The closure of USAID has left more than 60,000 tonnes of food aid rotting in depots around the world, Reuters reported in May.

Senator Tim Kaine criticized the administration over the waste, noting that legislators raised concerns with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in March and were assured at the time that no food aid would be squandered.

In a July 1 statement, Rubio defended the decision to shutter USAID, saying the US was moving away from “a charity-based model” to focus instead on helping countries grow sustainably.

The World Food Programme estimates that 319 million people globally face limited access to food, with 1.9 million in famine conditions, including in Sudan and Gaza.