Cuts in food aid to vulnerable refugees in the Middle East are making young men “prime targets” for recruitment by extremist groups, a top official at the UN’s World Food Programme said on Thursday.

Lack of funds may also force the organisation to order further cuts in provisions to Syrian refugees in the Middle East, many of whom already have to survive on a little over $13 a month in food allowances. “The one thing that they [refugee families] were not concerned about was their children having enough to eat,” said Ertharin Cousin, the WFP’s executive director, at a briefing for reporters in Beirut during a regional tour. “They have now added the ability to feed their children to the list.” There are 1.1 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, meaning that one out of every five people living in the country have been displaced by the war. Earlier this summer, the WFP announced that it was cutting food allowances to the most vulnerable refugees here to $13.5 a month per person, an amount that barely provides them with enough food for a week to 10 days. The organisation has also cut its recipients from about 900,000 at the start of the year to 770,000 today.

The WFP now needs to raise $163m by the start of October in order to continue with its current levels of assistance to Syrians until the end of the month, before appealing for more aid. The organisation spends about $25m a week in food aid. Cousin said that the burden of providing food to vulnerable families is increasingly falling on children and young men, who are abandoning schools or entering the labour force, and who are becoming more vulnerable to recruitment by extremist organisations. “What concerns me is the young men who I was meeting with, who are feeling that responsibility that we talked about, who see no other method of feeding their family other than to return to Syria,” she said. “They become prime targets for the Islamist extremist groups who are paying money for service. So if that then is how they can feed their family, that is attractive and that is something that should worry us all.” Thousands of young children have entered the labour force in Lebanon. In the capital Beirut, many work as shoe shiners or sell street wares, often leaving them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, and sleeping rough. Some turn to prostitution, the highest paying job they can find on the city’s streets.

In the agricultural hinterland of the Bekaa Valley, many work long hours in the fields and warehouses for a measly wage, skipping school to provide for large families.

Refugees in Lebanon are particularly vulnerable, because the overwhelming majority are women and children, and roughly half of the refugees were displaced more than once inside Syria before seeking refuge in Lebanon, and have been left with few resources. The country also lacks formal camps to house the large refugee population, leaving people to reside amid local communities, increasing tensions and competition over jobs. In Jordan, the WFP employs a two-tier system, providing just $7 of food aid to vulnerable refugees and $14 to the extremely vulnerable. The first group will be cut off from the aid programme at the start of September, due to funding shortfalls. “Our plan B is to continue to alter the programme, to expend as much money as we have to serve as many people as possible for as long as possible,” said Cousin. “How much assistance we provide will depend on how much money we receive. How many people will we serve will depend on how much money we receive. How long we serve them will depend on how much money we receive.” Cousin said she raised the possibility of allowing Syrians to enter the labour force with the Lebanese government, doing jobs where they will not compete with the local population, such as in agriculture, construction and restaurants. The proposal faces significant hurdles in Lebanon’s delicately balanced sectarian system, and in the growing resentment towards the large refugee population that has stretched the country’s infrastructure past breaking point. But the immediate problem of food cuts will further strain refugee households, most of whom are forced to eat fewer meals and to completely cut meat products out of their diet, resorting to little more than staples such as bulgur wheat and rice to satisfy hunger. Cousin said the funding shortfalls were due to WFP relying entirely on voluntary contributions, and the enormity of the global refugee crisis, which has displaced 60 million people worldwide. “We have more conflict-related crises simultaneously occurring than at any other time in recent memory,” she said. “In the Syrian crisis there is no political solution on the horizon, which means that this population continues to be affected, [and] the stories of ordinary people is diminished by the story of the conflict.” She couched her appeal for aid in the terms of recognising the “common humanity” shared with the refugees. “Every culture and every religion in the world says we must feed the poor,” she said. “They are the victims of an evolving situation that is as much a crisis today as when they left their homes three or four years ago.”