U.N.’S WORLD FOOD PROGRAM RECEIVES NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
Committee warns of impending food crisis
ROME
The World Food Program was awarded the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a recognition of the critical work by the United Nations agency to battle hunger around the world, especially as the coronavirus pandemic has brought a global spike in poverty.
Announcing the prize in Oslo, Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the world was in danger of a food crisis of “inconceivable proportions.”
For decades, the Rome-based World Food Program has played a
central role in dealing with people caught in conf lict or f leeing for safety. But Reiss-Andersen also emphasized a symbolic aspect of the selection, describing WFP ’s work as a form of global cooperation that seemed in danger
in an era of nationalism and rising mistrust.
“The need for international solidarity and multilateral cooperation is more conspicuous than ever,” Reiss-Andersen said.
“Humanity is facing the greatest crisis any of us have seen in our lifetimes.”
David Beasley • Executive director, World Food Program
“In the face of the pandemic, the World Food Program has demonstrated an intensive ability to intensify its efforts,” she said. “The crisis hits communities and nations who have an instable infrastructure, have food instability, much harder than it hits other communities.”
The coronavirus pandemic has caused more than 1 million deaths globally, but it has also triggered a broader economic crisis that has particularly hit lowwage workers and people in developing countries where there is little social safety net.
Last month, the World Food Program’s executive director, David Beasley, warned of a wave of famine that could sweep the globe, brought on by a combination of conf lict and the co
ronavirus pandemic. He said WFP needed $5 billion to prevent an estimated 30 million people dying from starvation. Beasley pointedly noted that there are 2,000 billionaires in the world, and asked them to help.
“Humanity is facing the greatest crisis any of us have seen in our lifetimes,” Beasley said.
Because of the coronavirus, the agency estimates that the number of people facing food insecurity will double, to roughly 270 million. Lockdowns and weakened economies are undermining a decadeslong — and largely successful — effort to reduce extreme poverty. The World Bank projects poverty levels to rise for the first time since the 1990s.
The backslide can be seen everywhere from India — which shed more than 100 million jobs — to Latin America, where more than one-third of the population is expected to face food insecurity this year, according to aid group estimates. Nearly half of the people that will be pushed into extreme poverty this year live in sub-Saharan Africa.
“In the blink of an eye, a health crisis became an economic crisis, a food crisis, a housing crisis, a political crisis. Everything collided with everything else,” the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said in a recent report. “We’ve been set back about 25 years in about 25 weeks.”
Millions in Syria and Yemen depend each month on WFP for survival. The organization says that more than 800 million people are chronically hungry, most of them living in conf lictstricken areas.
Reiss-Andersen said that the Nobel Committee hoped that the prize would spur governments around the world to contribute more to the operations of the organization, which says that at current funding levels, 265 million people globally will go hungry.
“Multilateral cooperation is absolutely necessary to combat global challenges,” she said.
“Multilateralism seems to have a lack of respect these days, and the Nobel Committee definitely wants to emphasize this aspect.”
She did not call out President Donald Trump by name, but it seemed to be an unmistakable reference to his administration and its questioning and criticism of groups such as United Nations, the European Union, the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization.
The World Food Program relies on voluntary funding. It has not been targeted for U.S. funding reductions threatened for other U.N. agencies such as the World Health Organization.
The United States contributed $2 billion to WFP in 2015, the largest amount by far of any nation. Last year, the U.S. donated nearly $3.4 billion, again the highest figure.
Though other organizations have won the peace prize — most recently the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, in 2017 — the World Food Program is particularly sprawling. The organization has 17,000 staff worldwide, works in some 80 countries, and says it has more than 20 ships, 92 planes, and 5,600 trucks on the move on any given day.
The number of hungry people across the world has increased in recent years, including across Africa and southern Asia, where malnutrition is most widespread. But WFP’s greatest challenge in recent years has come in Yemen, where nearly six years of conf lict has left 20 million people in crisis, with another 3 million potentially facing starvation due to the coronavirus.
Many Yemenis remain out of reach of assistance, because of the remoteness of some hard-hit areas, and because of violence that has made it perilous for aid groups to deliver relief. The WFP said that, despite those challenges, it delivers assistance “to the vast majority of the vulnerable people in the country.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee noted the role of hunger as a weapon of war, seemingly a reference to WFP ’s criticism of Yemen’s Houthi rebels for diverting food aid and preventing access to WFP and other aid groups.
“It’s one of the oldest conf lict weapons in the world, that you can starve out a population to enter a territory,” Reiss-Andersen said. “If you get control over the food, you get also military control and you get better control of civilians. You can also use food insecurity as a method to chase populations away from their territory.”
The deadline for nominations for this year’s prize was Feb. 1 — seemingly a different era in a world that was not yet paralyzed by the pandemic.
Reiss-Andersen said that the World Food Program would have been a worthy winner in any year, but “there is a connection of the increased hunger of the starving populations of the world today and the pandemic.”
The announcement was made amid somber circumstances, with much of the world struggling to control the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Norway is faring better than most of the rest of Europe, but its cases have still risen from summertime lows. With every in-person gathering a risk, this year’s announcement was a strippeddown affair, without the jostling, cheerful crowd of journalists who assemble at the ornate offices of the Norwegian Nobel Institute in more typical Octobers.