Global forced displacement tops 70 million – UNHCR

The highest number ever recorded.

Riyaz Patel

Despite populist rhetoric in the West, the real refugee crisis is playing out in developing countries, which hosts most of the more than 70 million displaced people who have fled war and persecution, the United Nations has said.

Half of the worlds forcibly displaced are children and the 2018 total is the highest in nearly 70 years, doubling that of 20 years ago, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said in its annual report, Global Trends.

Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said notions that Europe, the United States or Australia has a refugee emergency is a fallacy.

“Eighty percent of the refugees, so the people who have left their country are in the next