Funding cuts force WFP to stop food aid to one million in Myanmar
YANGON, Myanmar (AFP) — The World Food Programme (WFP) will be forced to cut off one million people in war-torn Myanmar from its vital food aid because of “critical funding shortfalls”, it said on Friday.
The United States (US) provided the United Nation (UN) programme with US$4.4 billion of its US$9.7 billion budget in 2024 but Washington’s international aid funding has been slashed under President Donald Trump.
Myanmar has been gripped by civil war following a 2021 military coup, plunging it into what the United Nations describes as a “polycrisis” of mutually compounding conflict, poverty and instability.
It is controlled by a shifting patchwork of junta forces, ethnic armed groups and pro-democracy partisans that have fractured the economy, driven up poverty and complicated the supply of aid.
The WFP says more than 15 million people in the country of 51 million are unable to meet their daily food needs, with more than two million “facing emergency levels of hunger”.
“More than one million people in Myanmar will be cut off from WFP’s lifesaving food assistance starting in April due to critical funding shortfalls,” it said in a statement.
“These cuts come just as increased conflict, displacement and access restrictions are already sharply driving up food aid needs,” it said.
The statement did not mention the United States by name or any other donor countries.
But the WFP’s Myanmar director Michael Dunford told AFP the organisation was “short of the funding because a whole range of different donors have not been able to meet our requirements”.
“This includes the US, but it’s definitely not only the US,” he said.
Without immediate new funding, the WFP said it will have to cut aid to vulnerable groups including children under five, pregnant and breastfeeding women and the disabled — assisting only 35,000 of them.
The UN warned last year that Rakhine state in Myanmar’s west faces an “imminent threat of acute famine”.
WFP said the upcoming cuts would hit 100,000 internally displaced people in Rakhine — including members of the persecuted Rohingya minority — who will “have no access to food” without its assistance.
“The people, as we inform them of the reduction in the ration levels, are very anxious,” said Dunford.
“They’re asking us, ‘Well what are we going to do now?”
