Refugee rations cut

A shortage of funding, together with the need to stretch the food resources it has for Tanzania to the end of the year, has forced the WFP to reduce by 40 percent its general bi-weekly food ration to refugees in Kigoma and Kagera regions, WFP official Selma Kalousek told IRIN on Wednesday. On a daily basis, that meant a reduction in food from 600 grammes to 360 grammes per day from Wednesday, though the agency would be making every effort to protect vulnerable populations by maintaining full rations for the elderly, pregnant and lactating mothers, and small children, she said. The food shortfall for Tanzania is 14,000 mt - or the equivalent of US $7.7 million in funding - for the rest of the year. “Since the rationing includes all the basic commodities refugees are receiving - maize, beans, vegetable oil and salt - this will have a negative impact on their nutritional intake in the medium term [two months or more],” Kalousek said. “We are really up against a wall in Tanzania ... Reducing food rations is not ideal but, right now, it is all we can do to keep people in the camps fed,” she added.

WFP was also concerned about potential security issues arising from the reduced food rations. The agency anticipated that reduced rations may result in higher tension between refugees and the host population where such tensions already existed, Kalousek said. The difficulty in feeding refugees in Tanzania arose because of the numbers involved (Tanzania hosts 450,000 refugees, some 350,000 of them from Burundi, the fact that these were still rising (up 25,000 since the start of this year), and because it was hard to sustain donor interest in prolonged refugee crises when funding tended to be funnelled towards “the crisis of the day”, she stated. It takes up to four months for food pledged to actually make it to the camps, “making immediate donations of the essence”, she added.