UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in addition to conflicts, new challenges like global warming and poverty had also added to the growing refugee crisis.

"Recent food and fuel shortages have had an immediate and dramatic effect on the poor and the dispossessed, including refugees and the internally displaced," he told reporters in Kenya, where he was marking World Refugee Day.

"Extreme price increases have generated instability and conflict in many places, with the very real potential of triggering more displacement," he added.

Food prices have doubled in three years, according to the World Bank, sparking riots in many African nations and elsewhere. Brazil, Vietnam, India and Egypt have all imposed food export restrictions.

Experts say Africa's spending on cereal imports is expected to rise by more than 50 percent in 2008, with countries like Ivory Coast, Senegal and Nigeria -- among the world's top rice importers -- suffering most because the major exporters in southeast Asia is reeling from similar problems.

"Old barriers to human mobility have fallen and new patterns of movement have emerged, including forms of forced displacement that were not envisaged by the 1951 UN Refugee Convention," Guterres said, referring to the time the agency was created to find solutions for Europeans uprooted in the aftermath of World War II.

The UNHCR chief chided some government to turning down genuine refugees thus snowballing the challenges facing the UN organisation.

"Our work is becoming increasingly difficult in many parts of the world. In some countries, efforts to control illegal migration are failing to make a proper distinction between those who choose to move and those who are forced to flee because of persecution and violence.

"All too often, we see refugees turned away at the borders of countries where they had hoped to find safety and asylum," Guterres added.

"Refugees show incredible courage and perseverance in overcoming enormous odds to rebuild their lives. Ensuring that they get the protection they deserve is a noble cause because refugee rights are human rights - and rights that belong to us all," he added.

There are 11.4 million refugees outside their countries and 26 million others displaced internally by conflict or persecution at the end of 2007, contributing to an unprecedented number of people uprooted under the care of the UNHCR, the agency said.

The statistics indicate that Somalis were the fifth largest group of refugees and sixth largest group of internally displaced people under UNHCR's care worldwide, and the second largest group claiming asylum after Iraqis.

A survey by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), a non-governmental group, said China, India, Malaysia, Thailand and Bangladesh have been identified as among the worst violators of refugees' rights.

They joined Iraq, Kenya, Russia, Sudan and Europe as the 10 worst places for refugees last year, according to the World Refugee Survey 2008 released in Washington on Thursday.

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