Myanmar: UN short on funds due to Rakhine violence

By Kyaw Ye Lynn

YANGON, Myanmar

The UN World Food Program in Myanmar is reportedly facing a $19 million funding shortfall due to the growing number of people displaced by recent violence in the country’s western Rakhine state.

The need for extra funds comes despite recent donations of $7.4 million from the United States, Australia, and Sweden for displaced people in the northern Rakhine state, according to a report by Irrawaddy, a local online magazine on Friday.

“We do not have funding to continue operations through to June, but we are good until the end of February,” WFP’s Partnerships Officer Arsen Sahakyan told Irrawaddy.

He said that the WFP’s Myanmar budget was strained by the “unexpected and unplanned” needs of the displaced people in Rakhine’s Maungdaw area following the deaths of nine police officers last October.

“We simply did not anticipate that something of this scale might happen,” said Arsen Sahakyan.

The Oct. 9 attacks and subsequent military crackdown in Maungdaw area have displaced more than 87,000 people, mostly members of the stateless Rohingya minority group, since last October, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a weekly report on Monday.

Among them, at least 21,000 people are estimated to be internally displaced in the area near the country’s western border with Bangladesh, it said.