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

Here are the key takeaways from AP’s investigation, as told through the people who have been impacted:

The funding cuts have been fatal

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.”

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.

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.

Kneecapped by the funding cuts, the U.N.'s World Food Program in April severed assistance to 1 million people across Myanmar, including to Taher’s family.

After their food rations evaporated, Taher’s family meals shrank from three a day to one.

Taher’s son, Mohammed 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 AP.

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.”

Children have paid the steepest price

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. 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.

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.

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

Foraging for survival

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 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 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. That has left many like Karmar dependent on the jungle’s quickly-dwindling resources to survive.

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.

The lack of food has driven scores of desperate people to steal, he says. 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.

Day after day, Karmar 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.”

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.”