The United Nations will increase the food ration for each Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh by $2 a month, to $10, from Jan. 1, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Tuesday, as it thanked donors for coming to the rescue of a cash-strapped effort.
The United Nations had cut food aid last year to the refugees by a third, to $8 each every month, as it had raised less than half of the $876 million required to support them.
Nearly a million members of the Muslim minority from Myanmar live in bamboo-and-plastic camps in Bangladesh's border district of Cox's Bazar, most of them having fled a military crackdown in 2017.
"The rapid deterioration of the food and nutrition situation in the camps is extremely worrying," Dom Scalpelli, the WFP's director in Bangladesh, said in a statement.
The WFP said a latest survey showed malnutrition in the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh was at its highest since the 2017 influx and had exceeded the emergency threshold of 15 percent, according to the World Health Organization's emergency classification.
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