The Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize 2020 to the United Nation’s (UN) World Food Programme (WFP) for its efforts to combat hunger and for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for preventing the use of hunger being weaponised in war and conflict.
The WFP, which was established in 1961 at the behest of the US president Dwight Eisenhower, is the world’s largest humanitarian organisation (certified as the largest by the Guinness World Records in 2002) committed towards its global goal of ending hunger by the year 2030.
In 2015, eradication of world hunger became one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and WFP is the UN’s primary instrument in achieving that goal. WFP was awarded the peace prize “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.”
WFP provides food assistance in two ways, either by way of providing food or by meeting people’s food-needs by providing cash-based transfers. The cash-based transfers were launched for the first time in 2005 in response to the tsunami in Sri Lanka. In 2019, WFP provided assistance to close to 100 million people spread across 88 countries by supplying them with over 4.2 million metric tonnes of food and $1.2 billion in cash and vouchers. The organisation has provided food aid to over 4.5 million victims of the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, in 2011 to millions of people affected by the Syrian conflict, in 2014 to people affected by the Ebola outbreak and in 2015 to the Nepal earthquake survivors.
The organisation estimates hunger by the prevalence of undernourishment. The UN defines undernourished or food-deprived people as those individuals whose food intake falls below the minimum level of dietary energy requirements. about 8.9 per cent of the world’s population or about 690 million people are hungry and as per WFP if the current trends continue, by 2030 there will be 840 million hungry people.
Further, about 135 million suffer from acute hunger mainly as a result of man-made conflicts, climate change and economic downturns. WFP estimates that the COVID-19 pandemic could possibly double that figure.
