Bangladesh: MSF warns of acute malnutrition crisis among Rohingya refugees
Over a million people at risk due to $115.6 million funding gap
As the ripple effect of cuts in the humanitarian sector continue to reverberate around the world, more than one million Rohingya refugees remain confined to camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
Last week the World Food Programme made an alarming announcement that they plan to cut food rations in half due to funding shortfalls. We’re talking here about more than a million stateless people, who have no right to work, no land and no other legal means of subsistence to feed themselves.
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is extremely concerned that a reduction in food rations would only further heighten the Rohingya refugee crisis and the sense of desperation already prevalent throughout the camps. We know what desperation and the need to survive in this closed camp creates in terms of violence and the risk of exploitation, particularly for women and children. Many refugees tell us they are afraid it will only get worse.
Young children will be particularly at risk to the permanent effects of stunting on one hand, whereby their growth essentially stops due to lack of food, and on the other, also being more prone to illnesses while malnourished. Adults, many of whom are looking after children or elderly family members, will likely be forced to engage in negative coping mechanisms, from limiting their own diets to feed their families to pursuing exploitative income-generating activities.
This announcement comes at a time when people who recently arrived in the camps are already dependent on other people’s food rations to survive. In the words of Rahima, who recently fled violence in Myanmar and is sheltering with extended family in the camps, “I’m a burden. They share their meager food with me.” Masuda, another Rohingya woman, told us how the rations she and her family get, even now, are never enough.
The Rohingya have been kept in a situation of donor dependency. Donors, governments and international agencies must help close the $115.6 million funding gap.
MSF is calling on donors to pledge emergency funds by April to secure vital food rations for refugees, for governments to ramp up short-term humanitarian assistance to meet critical needs and for international agencies to join forces with the food security and nutrition agencies to ensure resources are put in place swiftly and transparently. We know today it is going to be harder than ever to mobilize these resources, but a way must be found because to withhold humanitarian assistance from a community that has been deliberately kept dependent on it is really unconscionable.
