Nearly 800,000 refugees in Africa have had their food rations slashed due to a lack of global aid funding, threatening to push many to the brink of starvation, the UN warned on Tuesday. The cuts of up to 60 percent are "threatening to worsen already unacceptable levels of acute malnutrition, stunting and anaemia, particularly in children," the United Nations' World Food Programme and refugee agency UNHCR said in a joint statement.
The heads of the two agencies were in Geneva on Tuesday to make an urgent appeal to governments for more funds to help feed Africa's refugees. "It is unacceptable in today's world of plenty for refugees to face chronic hunger," said UNHCR chief Antonio Guterres. WFP will need $186 million (136 million euros) by the end of the year to restore full rations and prevent cuts elsewhere, while UNHCR said it needed another $39 million (29 million euros) to fund the nutritional support it provides to vulnerable refugees across the continent.
"Many refugees in Africa depend on WFP food to stay alive and are now suffering because of a shortage of funding," Ertharin Cousin said in a statement. Refugees hit by ration cuts were desperately looking for ways to put food on the table, with the crisis pushing more and more children to quit school to seek work and prompting families to marry off their girls at a younger age. "Survival sex" prostitution by women and girls trying to raise money for food was also a growing problem, the statement said.
The funding crisis has forced WFP to cut rations for a third of the 2.4 million refugees it helps feed in 22 African countries, with more than half of the 800,000 affected refugees seeing rations slashed by at least 50 percent. The situation was most dire for the 300,000 refugees in Chad - mainly from Sudan's Darfur region and from the Central African Republic - whose rations had been cut by as much as 60 percent, the statement said.