Surging prices may force more people from homes: UNHCR

The head of the UN refugee agency warned Friday that instability created by surging oil and food prices may force increasing numbers of people from their homes in search of basic necessities.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in addition to conflicts, new challenges like global warming and poverty had also added to the growing refugee crisis.

“Recent food and fuel shortages have had an immediate and dramatic effect on the poor and the dispossessed, including refugees and the internally displaced,” he told reporters in Kenya, where he was marking World Refugee Day.

“Extreme price increases have generated instability and conflict in many places, with the very real potential of triggering more displacement,” he added.

“Old barriers to human mobility have fallen and new patterns of movement have emerged, including forms of forced displacement that were not envisaged by the 1951 UN Refugee Convention,” Guterres said, referring to the time the agency was created to find solutions for Europeans uprooted in the aftermath of World War II.

Terra Daily