The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, on Thursday, warned a food security crisis fuelled by the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is set to push more people to flee their homes, driving record levels of global displacement even higher, reported The UN News.
According to the annual Global Trends report published by the UNHCR on Thursday, some 89.3 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide due to persecution, conflict, abuse, and violence by the end of 2021. This year millions more have fled from Ukraine or been displaced within its borders due to the ongoing war.
“If you have a food crisis on top of everything I have described – war, human rights, climate — it will just accelerate the trends I’ve described in this report,” said Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, describing the figures as staggering.
Grandi warned that the international community must come together to take action to address this human tragedy, resolve conflicts and find lasting solutions or the terrible, devastating trend will continue.
According to the UNHCR report, the number of displaced has increased every year over the past decade, but it is now more than double the 42.7 million people displaced in 2012.
Grandi also criticized the monopoly of resources provided to Ukraine, while other programs to help the displaced remained underfunded.
“Ukraine should not make us forget other crises,” he said, mentioning the ongoing conflict in Ethiopia and a severe drought in the Horn of Africa.
The UNHCR head said the European Union’s response to refugee crises has been unequal. He compared the bickering between states over taking in small groups of migrants crossing the Mediterranean by boat with EU countries’ generosity with Ukrainian refugees since Russia’s invasion in February.
“Certainly it proves an important point: responding to refugee influxes, to the arrival of desperate people on the shores or borders of rich countries is not unmanageable,” he said.
The UN body’s report said that low-and-middle income countries hosted 83% of the world’s refugees at the end of 2021.
