Nobel Peace Prize 2020: World Food Programme wins Peace Prize for its efforts to battle hunger amid Covid pandemic

The Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2020 to the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency, for its efforts to battle hunger and improve conditions for peace in regions influenced by strife.

The committee noticed that the World Food Programme illustrated “an impressive ability to intensify its efforts” as the Covid pandemic pushed millions more into hunger.

The Nobel Prize Committee took to Twitter to declare the winner: “The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to the World Food Programme (WFP).”

With the current year’s Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the WFP, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to turn the eyes of the world towards a great many individuals who experience the ill effects of or face the threat of hunger.

The Covid-19 pandemic has added to a solid upsurge in the number of victims of hunger in the world. Even with the pandemic, 2020 Nobel Prize laureate the World Food Programme has shown a great ability to escalate its efforts.

2020 Nobel Prize laureate, the World Food Programme, plays a key role in multilateral cooperation on making food security an instrument of peace and has made a solid contribution towards preparing the UN Member States to battle the use of hunger as a weapon of war and strife.

There were 318 applicants – 211 people and 107 associations – for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize, which is the fourth biggest number in the history of the prize.

WFP reacted by tweeting its thanks for “recognition of the work of WFP staff who put their lives on the line every day to bring food and assistance to more than 100 million hungry children, women and men across the world”.

The World Food Programme has intentionally worked towards this objective by giving food to up to 100 million individuals living across 88 nations. The body has worked towards lessening hunger, as well as humanitarian efforts to restore peace and stability in territories of conflict. Its work is much more admirable remembering the scores of individuals who went hungry during the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic.

The committee said in a statement that the programme is the world’s biggest humanitarian association which centers around tending to hunger and promoting food security. “In 2019, the WFP assisted to close to 100 million people in 88 countries who are victims of acute food insecurity and hunger,” the announcement included.

It said that the World Food Programme was an active member of the diplomatic process that finished in May 2018 in the UN Security Council’s unanimous appropriation of Resolution 2417. The resolution was one of the first to explicitly address the connection between struggle and hunger.

“The link between hunger and armed conflict is a vicious circle: war and conflict can cause food insecurity and hunger, just as hunger and food insecurity can cause latent conflicts to flare up and trigger the use of violence,” the committee said. It included the WFP is the main impetus in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.

“The work of the World Food Programme to the benefit of humankind is an endeavor that all the nations of the world should be able to endorse and support,” the announcement said.

Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and the World Health Organization were viewed as competitors for the current year’s award.

A year ago, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali had won the prize for his efforts to end the nation’s conflict with its neighbor Eritrea.

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to American poet Louise Glück on Thursday “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

On Wednesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to French Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer A Doudna for the development of a method for genome editing.

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded on Tuesday went to Roger Penrose for black hole discovery and Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for finding a supermassive compact object at the centre of the galaxy.

On Monday, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded together to Americans Harvey J Alter and Charles Rice alongside Briton Michael Houghton for the revelation of the Hepatitis C virus.

The Nobel committee will declare the Nobel Prize in Economics on October 12.