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Alarm grows over WFP plan to cut food aid for Rohingya refugees
Alarm is growing over the World Food Programme’s (WFP) plan to cut food aid to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees living in camps in Bangladesh because of a severe shortfall in funding.
The WFP, the United Nations food agency, has said it will need to cut rations to the refugees next month because of a lack of funds.
The monthly allowance will be cut by 17 percent to $10 per person from March 1, with the WFP warning more cuts will be necessary without new funding by April. The agency is appealing for $125 million in funding.
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“If these cuts are made, they will be imposed on vulnerable people who are already food insecure,” Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on food insecurity, and Tom Andrews, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, said in a joint statement on Thursday.
The statement noted there were already high levels of malnutrition in the camps in Bangladesh, where some 750,000 mostly Muslim Rohingya fled in 2017 amid a brutal military crackdown in their native Myanmar. More than a third of children there are stunted and underweight, the experts added.
“The repercussions of these cuts will be immediate and long-lasting, as refugees remain almost entirely dependent on this assistance for their nutritional needs,” the UN experts said.
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