Nobel Peace Prize goes to World Food Program for efforts to combat hunger
By Michael Birnbaum and Chico Harlan,
The World Food Program was awarded the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a recognition of the critical work the United Nations agency does to prevent hunger around the world, especially during the coronavirus pandemic.
“The need for international solidarity and multilateral cooperation is more conspicuous than ever,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, announcing the prize in Oslo. She said the organization would receive the award “for its efforts to combat hunger.”
“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 award is an acknowledgment of the central role the Rome-based organization plays in dealing with impoverished people caught in or fleeing from conflict. The WFP, which was established in 1961, has become the primary international organization for people dealing with hunger — at a time when climate change and prolonged conflicts in the Middle East and Africa are exacerbating the challenge.
Millions in Syria and Yemen depend each month on the WFP for survival. The organization says that more than 800 million people are chronically hungry, most of them living in conflict-stricken 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.
[Nobel Prize in literature awarded to Louise Glück]
Falume Bachir
AP
In this handout photo provided by the World Food Program, people wait to collect food parcels in Cabo Delgado Province, Mozambique, on Aug. 27.
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 the WFP’s greatest challenge in recent years has come in Yemen, where, after nearly six years of conflict, 20 million people are in crisis, with another 3 million potentially facing starvation due to 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 says 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 the 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 conflict 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.”
[Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to two women who developed gene-editing tool]
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 WFP 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.”
She also said that the Nobel decision-makers had been especially interested in giving a boost to multilateralism at a time when leaders around the world have called into question cooperative efforts to solve global challenges.
“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 Trump by name, but it seemed to be an unmistakable reference to his administration, which has questioned and criticized, among other groups, the United Nations, the European Union, the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization.
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 stripped-down affair, without the jostling, cheerful crowd of journalists who assemble at the ornate offices of the Norwegian Nobel Institute in more typical Octobers.
Trump had been nominated for the prize by far-right Norwegian politicians, a fact he trumpeted in campaign advertising but which carried no meaningful weight, since a wide group of people are free to nominate whomever they wish. Trump had long sought the laurel, though given his unpopularity in Norway, where the decision is made, an award always seemed like a long shot.
Harlan reported from Rome.
Nobel Prize in literature awarded to Louise Glück
Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to two women who developed gene-editing tool
American Andrea Ghez, two others win Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries about black holes
