Rohingya refugees face a stark choice: fuel or food?
Four years ago, the world stood with the Rohingya people. Now, a simple necessity—cooking gas—threatens to unravel the fragile progress made, pushing families in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar refugee camps toward a desperate cycle of deforestation and hunger.
A childhood stolen, a future at risk
Ajas Khan, a Rohingya refugee and founder of the Rohingya Green Nature Society, remembers a time before the unspeakable violence. “As a child, my friends and I played football, laughed together, and dreamed of our lives to come,” he recounts. That normalcy shattered when, at just 13, he witnessed the horrors inflicted by Myanmar’s military. The ensuing exodus, a wave of over 750,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh, left indelible scars—and a dependence on international aid.
For two years following the 2017 crisis, aid agencies poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the camps, a lifeline for basic survival. But a critical oversight emerged: the lack of cooking fuel. Desperate families resorted to burning plastic bags, donated clothes, and precious wood from the Teknaf forest, accelerating deforestation and sparking tensions with local communities. The children, instead of attending school, were tasked with the arduous job of gathering firewood.
The situation improved temporarily in 2018 when the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration began distributing liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). These problems subsided, offering a semblance of stability. But the winds have shifted again.
Funding cuts threaten fragile gains
The United States, previously the largest donor to the Rohingya Joint Response Plan, drastically reduced its contribution in 2025, cutting nearly a third of its spending from $145 million to $100.7 million. This decline has crippled the LPG distribution program, leaving over 80,000 households without access to fuel, even with assistance from China and South Korea, which is only temporary.
“The financial importance of investing in the Rohingya people goes much further than how much money it saves,” Khan insists. The current crisis isn’t merely about fuel; it’s about the erosion of hope and the destabilization of a fragile ecosystem. The camps, once greener and brimming with optimism, now face a grim reality: refugees forced to revert to unsustainable and dangerous fuel sources.
The restrictions on Rohingya refugees’ ability to work or pursue higher education in Bangladesh further exacerbate their dependence on aid. Joe Phillips, a country director at Amideast, warns, “Shocks are always going to hit people on the ground hard, but as donor funding dries up… when there are shocks, the shocks are going to be worse.”
While alternative solutions like biogas and micro-grids have been proposed, a 2025 study concludes that implementing these options within the camps’ limited land and infrastructure presents significant challenges. LPG distribution, despite its own environmental impact, remains the most practical and immediate solution, far preferable to the widespread deforestation and toxic fumes caused by burning debris.
The US, in reducing its support, seems to have overlooked a fundamental truth: offering hope, even in the form of simple necessities like cooking gas, is an investment in stability and a rejection of the despair that breeds desperation and exploitation.
Khan, who completed high school thanks to initial humanitarian support and has since dedicated his life to promoting environmental sustainability within the Rohingya community, puts it simply: “Restoring LPG for my people is a simple thing; sometimes the simplest ideas can make the biggest change.” But without a renewed commitment from the international community, that change may remain tragically out of reach.