World Refugee Day — More than numbers
World Refugee Day today will draw attention to numbers — the millions forced by strife, conflict or persecution to leave their homes and seek safety and shelter somewhere else. But all those numbers are people … people like Roshida, a Rohingya woman who fled Myanmar with her four children in a horrifying escape attempt that saw her husband and mother-in-law killed.
Roshida and the children are now in a “mega-camp” at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, getting food assistance from WFP but worried about the future, with no adult male family member to work, earn income or even to get firewood.
That story is tragically too common in Bangladesh and other places around the world where man-made conflict forces people to flee their homes. And the World Food Programme is helping them in larger numbers — 9.3 million refugees received WFP assistance last year, up from 6.4 million the year before.
I’ve talked to them not just in Cox’s Bazar, but also in Uganda, hosting refugees from South Sudan, and in Lebanon, with refugees from the war in Syria. Their personal resilience amazes me, but often I notice the worry in their brows and see the fear — and, understandably, sometimes anger — in their eyes.
Many are suffering from or in danger of hunger, malnutrition and undernutrition. That is why, for example, in Cox’s Bazar, we gave 163,200 refugee women and children nutritious supplementary food last month, and why we have more than 100 nutrition sites where nutrition assistance is available to refugees and also to local people who are also vulnerable.
That illustrates a broader point about where refugees often head — not to a nation with an advanced economy, but often a country with its own challenges and limited resources. They work well with the humanitarian community, but these countries have capacity to do only so much. In fact, nine out of 10 refugees are hosted by low- or middle-income countries.
International assistance, then, is critical. But many WFP operations that support refugees, including the one in Bangladesh, are underfunded. In Kenya, which hosts more than a half a million refugees, we had to institute a 30 percent cut in food rations last November. These kind of resource challenges are likely to continue, as people are displaced for increasingly long periods of time.
It is also important to remember that none of these refugees wanted to leave. They were forced to by conflict — fighting which often exacerbates food insecurity that was already present in their home countries. And, as we showed in the WFP report, “At The Root Of Exodus,” a one percent increase in hunger increases migration by two percent.
The massive increase in the number of refugees, a rise in the number of hungry people, the constant conflict in regions … these woes are all intertwined. So as we mark World Refugee Day, we must focus on breaking this cycle. We must do more than simply shelter and feed people, but find long-term solutions that bring economic development, stability and peace.
