UN chief visits Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh as hunger fears rise United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has visited Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh as their food rations face drastic cuts next month, threatening already dire living conditions in the world’s bigger refugee settlement.
Guterres’s visit on Friday to the border district of Cox’s Bazar is seen as circumstantial, after the UN World Food Programme (WFP) broadcasted potential cuts to emergency food supplies following the shutdown of USAID operations.
Starting in April, the WFP may be forced to reduce food vouchers for the Rohingya from $12.50 to just $6 per month because of a lack of funding, strengthening fears of rising hunger in the overcrowded camps.
The United States provided the WFP with $4.4bn of its $9.7bn budget in 2024, at the same time Washington’s international aid funding has been slashed under President Donald Trump. Until recently, the US has been the top donor for Rohingya refugee aid.
The UN children’s agency UNICEF disclosed youngsters in the camps were experiencing the worst levels of malnutrition since 2017, with admissions for ascetic malnutrition treatment up 27 percent in February compared with the same month most recent year.
“Whatever we are given now is not enough. If that’s halved, we are simply going to starve,” revealed Mohammed Sabir, a 31-year-old refugee from Myanmar who has lived in the Cox’s Bazar camp since 2017.
Sabir, a father of five children, added, “We are not allowed to work here. I feel helpless when I think of my children. What will I feed them?”
Bangladesh’s interim government, which took power in August previous year following bulk demonstrates that took away former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, is hoping that Guterres’s visit will help draw international attention to the unrest and mobilise aid for refugees and citizens alike.
Bangladesh is sheltering more than 1 million Rohingya, members of a persecuted Muslim minority who fled violent purges in neighbouring Myanmar, mostly in 2016 and 2017, to camps in the southern Cox’s Bazar district, where they have limited access to jobs or education.
Category: World-News
Tag: UN chief visits Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh as hunger fears rise
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Published 3/14/2025