The United Nations has warned it will have to cut monthly food rations to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh from $12.50 (€11.6) to $6 next month unless it can raise funds to avert a measure that would worsen hunger in the world’s largest refugee settlement.
“Yesterday I was informed verbally, and today I received the letter confirming a $6.50 cut, which will take effect from April 1st,” said Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, Bangladesh’s top official overseeing the refugee camps. “What they are receiving now is already not enough, so it’s hard to imagine the consequences of this new cut,” he told Reuters by phone.
A spokesperson for the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, said the cuts could be averted if the organisation raised enough money in the coming weeks, adding in a statement that it was seeking $81 million.
Bangladesh is sheltering more than one million Rohingya, members of a persecuted Muslim minority who fled violent purges in neighbouring Myanmar mostly in 2016 and 2017, in overcrowded camps in the southern Cox’s Bazar district where they have limited access to job opportunities or education.
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Roughly 70,000 fled to Bangladesh last year, driven in part by growing hunger in their home Rakhine state.
In a letter to Rahman, seen by Reuters, the WFP said it had been trying to raise funds to keep the rations at $12.50 a month but had failed to find donors.
A cut in rations to anything less than $6 would “fall below the minimum survival level and fail to meet basic dietary needs”, it said.
WFP said $6 a month would still not allow refugees to meet the “minimum standard” for energy and nutrition, and pregnant and breastfeeding women with higher nutrient needs were particularly at risk.
The funding gap was due to a broad shortfall in donations rather than a decision by the Trump administration in the United States to cut foreign aid globally, the WFP said, adding that US support for food aid for the Rohingya had continued.
The US has been the top donor to the refugee response, supporting the UN in providing emergency food and nutrition assistance since 2017.
The head of the UN refugee agency Filippo Grandi said on Friday in a post on X during a visit to Cox’s Bazar that if donor support to the camps “decreases dramatically – which may happen – the huge work done by the Bangladesh government, aid agencies and refugees will be impacted, putting thousands at risk of hunger, disease and insecurity.”
A previous round of ration cuts to Rohingya in 2023 that reduced the amount of food rations to $8 monthly led to a sharp increase in hunger and malnutrition, according to the UN.
Within months, they said, 90 per cent of the camp population “struggled to access an adequate diet” and more than 15 per cent of children suffered from malnutrition, the highest rate recorded.
The cut was later reversed.
With $6 monthly the refugees would receive the equivalent of about 24 Bangladesh taka daily. “For comparison, a banana costs around 10-12 taka, and an egg costs 12-14 taka,” said Mr Rahman, the Cox’s Bazar-based official.
Mr Rahman said last month that the US contributed more than 50 per cent of the funds for the Rohingya humanitarian response in 2024, about $300 million.
The decision by the Trump administration to abruptly halt most US foreign aid and dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has caused turmoil in the humanitarian sector globally as US-funded programmes providing life-saving care for millions of people in countries such as Sudan and South Africa received termination notices.
The cuts by Washington meant there was already a “squeeze on operations” at hospitals in the Rohingya camps and in waste management, Rahman said, with five US-funded hospitals having to reduce services. He said if food were to be reduced it would create a “grievous problem”.
“These people are stateless, ill-fated and should not be suffering due to the funding crunch,” Mr Rahman said. – Reuters
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