After Ajib Bahar's six-month-old son fell sick last year in Myanmar's war-torn Rakhine state, the 38-year-old Rohingya mother said she had no medicine or food to give him. The boy died in her arms.

"My children cried all night from hunger. I boiled grass and gave it to them just to keep them quiet," Bahar said from a refugee camp in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar, where she and her family sought safety after fleeing violence and starvation in Myanmar.

Rakhine state, a western coastal region that has suffered years of conflict and ethnic violence mostly targeting the Rohingya Muslim minority, is now facing an "alarming" hunger crisis due to a "deadly combination of conflict, blockades and funding cuts," according to the United Nations' World Food Program (WFP).