A history of refugees

A history of refugees According to the United Nations, a refugee is a person who flees their home country due to a â€Å"well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.† From ancient to recent times, from poor areas to developed countries, refugees could be seen almost everywhere. Nowadays, although the global economy has been developing very fast, the problem of refugee still exits. With the old issues remain unsolved, the new ones also emerging, the situation of refugees did not improve a lot much. The number of refugees has kept raising and their geographical distribution has kept widening, how to find the solution to refugee problems has become a cross-century challenge for the whole world. Poverty is one of the fatal roots of the refugee problem. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in their report on the global food and agricultural situation, points out that there are still 13% of the hum an species on earth (about 800 million) are still starving. And the phenomenon is most serious in the African continent — there were about 400 million people lack of food or clothes; Asia following Africa sees the less worst situation — there are about 300 million people are still suffering from hunger all day long; And the population in Latin America who live under the poverty line reach the number of 70 million. We notice that, the number of refugees in each continent refers to a considerable proportion of the number of people suffer from starvation. The latest United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) statistics shows that there are more than 2100 million refugees in total worldwide, of which 8.44 million in Asia, 5.33 million in Africa, 1.04 million in North America, 570 thousand in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe is home for 564 thousand refugees among whom mostly come from Africa, Asia and Latin America. In recent years, our whole world se es the continuous development of science and technology along with the global economy. However, food shortage is still a very fatal and serious problem. In a report released by Food and Agricultural Organization in March, it demonstrated that due to continuous natural disasters, there are now 60 million people living in 33 different countries are facing various degrees of food insecurity problems. The report, entitled â€Å"Shortage of Food and Crops†, said that some African area in the south of sub-Saharan region is facing the most serious food deficit — 16 countries in that area are in extreme food shortage. In East Africa, although the situation of the year-long drought has been improved last year, yet 18 million people live in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Sudan and Tanzania still need the international community to continue to provide emergency food aid. In Mozambique and other southern African countries, the recent outbreak of floods caused severe damage to crops, an d these countries also need access to food aid too. Many countries in Asia are also troubled by the shortage of food. Serious food crisis has begun in Afghanistan due to continuing civil war and drought. East and Central Asia countries such as Armenia, Georgia and Tajikistan are also in the need of food aid due to the droughts happened in their domestics. Food shortages directly threaten the lives of local residents, in order to survive, the population in poor area was forced to leave their homes and become refugees of no fixed abodes.