UN Secretary-General Visits Rohingya Refugees Amid Looming Food Cuts in Bangladesh

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Aerial from the far end of Kutupalong Extention refugee camp where UNHCR has helped relocate new arrivals, Bangladesh. ; As an estimated 600,000 Rohingya sought safety in Bangladesh between late-August and October 2017, UNHCR began work on an extension site next to the long-established Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar. Whole families, young mothers and unaccompanied minors were among those fleeing for their lives since fighting reignited in Myanmar. They came by boat or walked barefoot for days, wading through vast rice fields. They left most of their possessions behind. Large groups crossed into south-eastern Bangladesh hungry, in poor physical condition and in need of life-saving support. By mid-September, the Bangladeshi Government allocated some 2,000 acres of land on which family tents and temporary communal shelters were erected to shelter new arrivals. UNHCR site planners estimate that these will be sufficient to house 150,000 people.

Cox’s Bazar, MINA – 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 largest refugee settlement, Al Jazeera reported.

Guterres’s visit on Friday to the border district of Cox’s Bazar is seen as critical, after the UN World Food Programme (WFP) announced 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, raising fears of rising hunger in the overcrowded camps.

The United States provided the WFP with $4.4bn of its $9.7bn budget in 2024, but 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.

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The UN children’s agency UNICEF said youngsters in the camps were experiencing the worst levels of malnutrition since 2017, with admissions for severe malnutrition treatment up 27 percent in February compared with the same month last year.

“Whatever we are given now is not enough. If that’s halved, we are simply going to starve,” said Mohammed Sabir, a 31-year-old refugee from Myanmar who has lived in a 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 last year following mass protests that removed former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, is hoping that Guterres’s visit will help draw international attention to the crisis and mobilize aid for refugees and citizens alike.

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Bangladesh is sheltering more than 1 million Rohingya, members of a persecuted Muslim minority who fled violent purges in neighboring Myanmar, mostly in 2016 and 2017, to camps in the southern Cox’s Bazar district, where they have limited access to jobs or education. []

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)

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