Refugees face ration cuts

The food aid pipeline for 14,000 refugees in Namibia will face a complete break from June onwards, the World Food Programme (WFP) has warned. WFP Namibia programme head Abdirahman Meygag told IRIN on Monday the agency "only has small quantities of food, enough only for May distributions" in the main refugee camp at Osire and the Kassava transit centre. "In June there will be no food to distribute to the 14,000 refugees. We are urgently appealing to the international community to come forward. Repatriations [to Angola] started in July 2003, however, only 4,200 refugees have been repatriated from July to November 2003," Meygag said. The voluntary repatriation programme was suspended during the rainy season and is scheduled to resume in May. "Had the repatriation been ongoing, the number of refugees [in Namibia] would have been less, but so long as they are here they will definitely require food assistance, given the fact that refugees in Osire and Kassava are entirely dependent on WFP assistance. They don't have access to the employment market, et cetera. Without WFP assistance it would be difficult for them to survive," Meygag explained. Apart from rations for people in the camps, WFP also provides transit food for repatriating refugees, thus the current funding crisis would "definitely affect the repatriation process". "We really require urgent cash donations - if we have cash we can quickly mobilise and procure food regionally and immediately deliver it," Meygag added. WFP had requested more than US $900,000 for refugee operations from June 2004 to April 2005, but received very little. "It is not a big amount of funding, but it is very essential. Without this [funding] the refugees will face difficulties," he noted.