Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar

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MAE SOT, Thailand (AP) — Mohammed Taher clutched the lifeless body of his 2-year-old son and wept. Ever since his family’s food rations stopped arriving at their internment camp in Myanmar in April, the father had watched helplessly as his once-vibrant baby boy weakened, suffering from diarrhea and begging for food.

On May 21, exactly two weeks after Taher’s little boy died, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before Congress and declared: “No one has died” because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program. Rubio also insisted: “No children are dying on my watch.”

That, Taher says, “is a lie.”

“I lost my son because of the funding cuts,” he says. “And it is not only me — many more children in other camps have also died helplessly from hunger, malnutrition and no medical treatment.”

Taher’s grief is echoed in families across conflict-ravaged Myanmar, where the United Nations estimates 40% of the population needs humanitarian assistance and which once counted the U.S. as its largest humanitarian donor. Now, in Asia, it has become the epicenter of the suffering unleashed upon the world’s most vulnerable by President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

And like Taher’s son, Mohammed Hashim, it is Myanmar’s children who have borne the brunt of the fallout. A study published in The Lancet journal in June said the U.S. funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5, by 2030.

Taher is one of 145,000 people forced to live inside squalid, prison-like camps in the state of Rakhine by the ruling military. Most, like Taher, are members of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority, which was attacked by the military in 2017 in what the U.S. declared a genocide.

After their food rations evaporated, Taher’s family meals shrank from three a day to one. Taher, his wife and his five children grew so weak, there were days they could not walk.

Little Hashim faded. The clever, caring toddler, who loved playing football and whose cheerful chirps of “Mama” and “Baba” once filled their shelter, could barely move. Anguished by his son’s sobs, Taher tried to find help. But with soldiers banning residents from leaving the camp to find food, and with no money for a doctor, there was nothing Taher could do.

On May 7, Taher and his wife watched their baby take his final breath. Their other children began to scream.

Neighbor Mohammed Foyas, who visited the family after Hashim died and was present for his burial, confirmed the details to The Associated Press.

Asked who is to blame for the loss of his son, Taher is direct: the United States.

“In the camps, we survive only on rations,” he says. “Without rations, we have nothing — no food, no medicine, no chance to live.”

Throughout Myanmar and in the refugee camps along its borders, the cuts in aid have left children screaming and crying for food. The USAID cuts come at a time when other countries have slashed humanitarian aid, in some cases saying they need the funds to shore up defense. Myanmar's population has also already been weakened by years of war.

Health care services have been hobbled, and, in some places, vanished. The sick and the starving have wasted away, and people must forage for hours in the jungle each day to find food. Violence and stealing have surged, and young people are huffing glue to numb their hunger pains.

This story is based on interviews with 21 refugees, five people trapped inside Myanmar’s internment camps, and 40 aid workers, medics and researchers.

Safehouses that sheltered dissidents have shuttered, leaving people at the mercy of Myanmar’s merciless military, which has killed more than 7,300 civilians and imprisoned nearly 30,000 in its torture-rife detention centers since its takeover in 2021.

“For Myanmar, we are in the lowest layer of hell already,” says Victor, who headed an emergency program for the aid group Freedom House that helped hundreds who defied Myanmar’s military regime.

Since the U.S. cuts shut down the program, around 100 civilians have sent Victor frantic messages pleading for help he can no longer give.

“I don’t know what to tell them,” says Victor, who goes by one name.

Though the U.S. only spends around 1% of its budget on foreign aid, Trump declared USAID — once the world’s leading donor of humanitarian assistance — a waste of money and dissolved it.

Kneecapped by aid cutbacks, the U.N.'s World Food Program in April severed assistance to 1 million people across Myanmar. In central Rakhine, the number of families unable to meet basic food needs has jumped to 57% from 33% in December 2024, according to the WFP.

The military has long been accused of blocking aid to parts of Rakhine. The funding cuts have thus made an already critical situation even more dire, says Tun Khin, president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK.

“These U.S. cuts to humanitarian aid are assisting the military in their genocidal policy of starvation against the Rohingya,” says Tun Khin.

The cuts have come during Myanmar’s darkest hour. In the aftermath of a massive earthquake that killed more than 3,800 in March, the U.S. sent three aid workers to Myanmar — all of whom received notices of their impending termination from the Trump administration while in the disaster zone.

A statement from the State Department that did not address most of AP's questions said the U.S. “continues to stand with the people of Burma,” using another name for Myanmar.

“While we continue to provide life-saving aid globally, the United States expects capable countries to increase their contributions where possible,” read the statement from the department, which has absorbed the few remaining USAID programs.

Michael Dunford, the WFP’s country director for Myanmar, visited Rakhine in April and said some mothers had resorted to making a thin soup out of grass to feed their children.

“The sense of desperation and also the lack of hope for this population was palpable,” Dunford says. “One old gentleman in tears said to me, ‘If WFP doesn’t feed us, and the authorities won’t support us, then please drop a bomb on us — because we can’t continue in this way.’”

For some, the pain caused by the aid cuts has become so intense that death seems like the only escape. So torturous was the sight of his starving family that 40-year-old father of two Mohammed Eliyas took his own life, says his son, Mohammed Amin.

After the food rations disappeared, Amin’s family began subsisting on one meal a day of rice and vegetable leaves.

“My father became restless and hopeless,” Amin says. “The sadness and despair grew so heavy that he began to believe death might be better than continuing to live in such endless hunger and misery.”

One day in June, as the family gathered for a meal, Eliyas began to cry. The family did not realize he’d mixed poison into his rice.

He never said goodbye.

Twelve-year-old Mohama squats in the mud, rain battering his rail-thin frame. He plucks worms from the dirt and places them in a ratty plastic cup.

The worms are bait for the fish he hopes to catch for his family. Recently, he says, there hasn’t been enough to eat in his Thailand refugee camp. So, despite the deluge, he grabs his bamboo fishing pole and wades through rushing water as high as his chest.

Many of Myanmar’s children have survived the horrors of war only to now find themselves hungry and hurting because of a political decision they don’t understand.

Mohama escaped to Thailand with his parents, older brother and two little sisters in 2023 after soldiers attacked their village. He remembers huddling in a bomb shelter, and running alongside hordes of others fleeing for their lives.

Mohama’s parents returned to Myanmar to find work, and his sisters eventually joined them. He lives now with his grandparents and teenage brother in a one-bedroom shelter.

After two hours, Mohama holds up his haul: around 10 tiny fish, each less than 3 centimeters (1 inch) long. It’s enough for a few mouthfuls.

Still, this is lucky. Some days, he says, he catches half as much.

Eleven-year-old Soe fights the river’s current on his own hunt for fish, his skinny frame swallowed by his pink T-shirt. Nearby, children haul logs as big as their bodies back to their shelters for their families to sell.

“Sometimes I get enough food,” says Soe. “But mostly, I’m hungry.”

Some days, he must skip breakfast and lunch and goes to school with a growling belly. At least school is still an option for him; Teacher Saung Hnin Wai says 10 students at her primary school have dropped out since the funding cuts because their parents cannot afford the fees and need their help foraging.

Most of the remaining students are struggling with hunger, she says, and the teaching supplies are dwindling. The funds they once received to repair the leaking roof have evaporated, so they must close the school when it rains.

When the rice runs out at 48-year-old Naung Pate’s shelter, panic sets in among her six children. She walls off her own worry and reassures them that she will find them food, though now there is never enough.

“Seeing my children eating nothing but rice with fish paste and leftover vegetables breaks my heart,” she says, her thin shoulders slumped with fatigue.

She unpacks her basket of foraged bamboo shoots, which will net her 4 baht (12 cents) a kilogram (2.2 pounds). It generally takes her eight hours of scaling mountains to gather enough shoots for one day’s worth of rice.

“If the U.S. doesn’t resume its support, I am worried about my children’s survival,” she says.

From his perch by the river, Ababa frantically points to his mouth, signaling his hunger. Next to him, his 60-year-old mother, Ababa Moe, shakes her head wearily. She has already given him her food for the day.

She has no real way of explaining the danger of their situation to her son, who is 17 years old but cognitively closer to a toddler. And as a single mother too weak to forage, she has no real way of ensuring their survival. She also is too old to benefit from a recent policy change the Thai government made in a bid to prevent mass starvation, granting work rights to some of the 107,000 Myanmar refugees who, like her, live in Thailand’s border camps.

Her son never learned to speak, and needs her help with everything from getting dressed to using the toilet. Since the funding cuts, their survival has hinged on the charity of her Christian church, whose members occasionally give her handfuls of their rice.

She suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure, and begins to sweat and grow dizzy when her hunger is at its fiercest. Some days, she eats nothing.

Knowing that everyone in the camp is in the same precarious position is, paradoxically, a grim comfort that staves off the worst of her fears.

“If we are going to starve, everybody will starve,” she says. “It’s not only me.”

The grandfather slides a knife into the sodden jungle floor, pries loose a bamboo shoot and places it into a tattered tote bag slung across his bony back. His stomach is empty, his breath ragged and his energy exhausted. But if he stops now, his family could starve.

Mahmud Karmar has been foraging in the jungle along the Thailand-Myanmar border for two hours and has barely collected enough to feed his wife, six children and 6-year-old grandson two meals. He presses his parched lips into the river, muddied by the monsoon rains, and guzzles.

“I am hungry,” Karmar says, panting. “So I drink the water to get myself full.”

For years, a grant by the U.S. State Department — which saw thousands of its foreign aid awards axed by the Trump administration — provided food and medicine to Karmar and the other Myanmar refugees living in the Thai border camps.

But the ending of that grant on July 31 forced the region’s main aid group, The Border Consortium, to terminate food assistance for 85% of camp residents. The consortium pleaded for donations, but others failed to fill the void left by the U.S.

On Sept. 30, the State Department signed an agreement for a temporary renewal of the grant, allowing rations to resume through the end of the year, says the consortium’s executive director Léon de Riedmatten. But after that, the funds will run out, and the State Department has made clear there will be no further extensions, he says.

Karmar didn’t just lose his food rations because of the aid cuts — he lost his job with the International Rescue Committee, which the State Department had, until July 31, funded to run health clinics in the camps. He has also lost 16 kilograms (35 pounds), his 54-kilogram (119-pound) frame now so slight that he has become unrecognizable even to close friends.

“We are almost dying,” he says. “There is nothing for us here.”

The 55-year-old sits in the dirt and wipes sweat from his brow. A few days earlier, he says, he fainted while attempting to work in a cornfield in a bid to earn 120 baht (US$3.75) — enough to buy one day’s worth of rice for his family.

Like the others languishing in these camps, this was not a life Karmar chose. He was pushed into it, by soldiers who razed his village and beat his brother to death. The bloodshed forced his family to flee in 2006 to the bamboo shelters on the edge of Thailand.

Life here has never been easy, he says. But since the aid cuts, it has become unbearable.

“The sorrow is so deep, I can’t even cry,” he says numbly. “The entire world has forgotten the refugees and the people of Myanmar.”

The lack of food has driven scores of desperate people to steal, he says. At night, he lies awake on the concrete floor of his leaking shelter, listening to the looting. He and several others recently rounded up 27 thieves in one night and sent them to detention.

Among the thieves was one of his friends. Karmar asked him in despair why he was doing this. “We have nothing to eat,” his friend replied.

Karmar refuses to steal, and so, on days when he is too sick to forage, he begs other refugees for help. Most days, though, he pushes his battered body up mountains and through rivers in search of anything his family can eat, trade or sell.

“There’s a heaviness in my heart,” he says, his voice breaking. “The children ask me for pocket money and I cannot give it to them, and that kills me.”

And it is with this thought that the tears trapped inside him finally fall. He wipes his eyes.

All he can do now is hope that the people of the United States show mercy on the people of Myanmar.

“We will all die if it continues like this — I am certain of it,” he says. “We can’t do this forever.”