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 marked World Refugee Day.
Food prices have doubled in three years, according to the World Bank, sparking riots in many African nations and elsewhere. Brazil, Vietnam, India and Egypt have all imposed food export restrictions.
Experts say Africa's spending on cereal imports is expected to rise by more than 50 percent in 2008, with countries like Ivory Coast, Senegal and Nigeria -- among the world's top rice importers -- suffering most because the major exporters in southeast Asia is reeling from similar problems.
"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.
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