NIAMEY, Niger (AP) — The World Food Program won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for fighting hunger and seeking to end its use as “a weapon of war and conflict” at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has driven millions more people to the brink of starvation.
Announcing the prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said it wished “to turn the eyes of the world towards the millions of people who suffer from or face the threat of hunger.”
The committee also said it hoped that bestowing the prize on the U.N. agency would highlight the need to strengthen global solidarity and cooperation in an era of go-it-alone nationalism.
“We are sending a signal to every nation who raises objections to international cooperation,” committee chair Berit Reiss-Andersen said. “We are sending a signal to this type of nationalism where the responsibility for global affairs is not being faced.”
The Rome-based agency was established in 1961 at the behest of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and has brought aid to multiple crises, including Ethiopia’s famine of 1984, the Asian tsunami of 2004 and the Haiti earthquake of 2010.
It continues to bring assistance to the world’s most dangerous and precarious places, from air-dropping food in South Sudan and Syria to creating an emergency delivery service that kept aid flowing even as pandemic restrictions grounded commercial flights.
In bestowing what is arguably the world’s most prestigious prize on the World Food Program, the Norwegian committee is honoring an organization headed by David Beasley, a Republican former South Carolina governor nominated for the job by President Donald Trump.
Beasley said the prize rightly goes to his entire team.
“I know I’m not deserving of an award like this — but all the men and women around the world in the World Food Program and our partners who put their lives on the line every day to help those in need, that is inspiring and encouraging,” he told The Associated Press by phone from Niger.
WFP staffers in Niger greeted Beasley with cheers and applause as he emerged to address a crowd after the announcement. “I didn’t win it, you won it,” he told them.
The award comes as Trump has pulled the United States out of several U.N. bodies, including the Human Rights Council and UNESCO, the cultural agency. He has also repeatedly criticized the U.N.’s World Health Organization over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and his administration has said the United States will leave it in July.
In light of that pullback, the choice of the World Food Program was particularly notable because the U.S. remains by far its biggest donor, the agency has been run by an American for nearly 40 years, and Beasley has been a rare recent example of U.S.-led internationalism.
The Nobel Committee said the problem of hunger has again become more acute in recent years, not least because the pandemic has added to the hardship already faced by millions.
WFP estimates that 690 million people worldwide suffer some form of hunger today.
“Where there is conflict, there is hunger. And where there is hunger, there is often conflict,” Beasley said in a statement on the agency’s website. “Today is a reminder that food security, peace and stability go together.”
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was delighted the award went to “the world’s first responder on the front lines of food insecurity.” It was the ninth award for the U.N. or one of its agencies.
“In a world of plenty, it is unconscionable that hundreds of millions go to bed each night hungry,” Guterres said. “Millions more are now on the precipice of famine due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The Nobel Committee called on governments to ensure that WFP and other aid organizations receive the financial support needed to feed millions in countries such as Yemen, Congo, Nigeria and South Sudan.
When the award was announced, Beasley was in Niger, following a visit to neighboring Burkina Faso — two countries in the Sahel region of Africa that he said is “under attack by extremists and climate extremes” and going through “a devastating” time.
A logistics juggernaut, WFP this year created a global emergency delivery service for humanitarian aid. Officials said the unprecedented effort involved nearly 130 countries and was key in ensuring that aid for the pandemic kept flowing in addition to other assistance, like the drugs and vaccines needed to combat other diseases.
As recently as this week, a WFP humanitarian convoy was attacked in South Sudan, drawing condemnation from the U.S. State Department.
There was no shortage of causes or candidates on this year’s Nobel list, with 211 individuals and 107 organizations nominated.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee maintains absolute secrecy about whom it favors before the announcement, but WFP had been on the short list of Dan Smith, the director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
“The global problem of hunger is increasing and so is the global problem of violent conflict,” Smith said. “The World Food Program works at the intersection of those two problems (and) it’s going to face an increasing workload in the coming years.”
Some, however, noted that the World Food Program’s top donors are also major food exporters and often involved in the sale of arms to conflict zones where the agency works, from Afghanistan to Yemen.
“This Nobel Prize is important to celebrate multilateral cooperation, to show solidarity between nations,” said Frederic Mousseau, policy director at The Oakland Institute, a progressive think tank based in California. “But we should not ignore the hypocrisy of the richest nations engaged in and profiteering from the wars where they finance WFP interventions.”
The award comes with a gold medal and a 10-milion krona ($1.1 million) cash prize that is dwarfed by the funding that WFP requires for its work. So far in 2020, the organization has received almost $6.4 billion in cash or goods, with over $2.7 billion coming from the U.S.
On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus. Tuesday’s prize for physics honored breakthroughs in understanding the mysteries of cosmic black holes, and the chemistry prize on Wednesday went to scientists behind a powerful gene-editing tool. The literature prize was awarded to American poet Louise Glück on Thursday for her “candid and uncompromising” work.
The Nobel Memorial Prize for economics, which was only established in 1968, will be awarded Monday.
—-
Jordans reported from Berlin and Gera from Warsaw, Poland. Associated Press journalists David Keyton in Stockholm; Karl Ritter, Nicole Winfield and Patricia Thomas in Rome; Cara Anna in Johannesburg; and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed.
—-
Read more about Nobel Prizes past and present by The Associated Press at https://www.apnews.com/NobelPrizes
Nobel win reflects ‘hunger for international cooperation’
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has fractured global alliances and go-it-alone has turned ugly, some world leaders say Friday’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the U.N. World Food Program was a commitment to the belief that only a concerted effort can save humanity from further disaster.
“This not only recognizes your tireless work for food security on our planet, but also reminds the key importance of multilateralism that delivers results,” European Council President Charles Michel said in a congratulatory message.
More succinctly: “Multilateralism now more important than ever before,” Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven tweeted.
Ahead of the announcement, some had speculated that the Nobel might go to a fellow United Nations body, the World Health Organization, which has promoted multilateralism in the face of criticism by President Donald Trump.
But the choice of the WFP — headed by an American, a Trump nominee — was widely seen as supporting the call to global solidarity that the U.N. and others have stressed as confirmed COVID-19 deaths climb past 1 million, and as famine becomes a danger in several countries.
Little symbolizes global connectedness more than the WFP, long the U.N.’s logistics expert, which in responding to the pandemic launched an extraordinary emergency aid delivery service as most global flights were grounded. It involved almost 130 countries, unprecedented in scope. That’s on top of its usual work feeding millions of hungry people around the world.
The Nobel Committee made it clear this year’s award was a plea for unity.
“We are sending a signal to every nation (that) raises objections to international cooperation. We are sending a signal to this type of nationalism where the responsibility for global affairs is not being faced,” committee head Berit Reiss-Andersen said shortly after the award was announced. She didn’t name names.
She added: “Multilateral cooperation is absolutely necessary to combat global challenges. And multilateralism seems to have a lack of respect these days, and the Nobel Committee definitely wants to emphasize this aspect.”
The renewed call to solidarity faces fearsome challenges.
Some rich countries have stockpiled millions of doses of potential COVID-19 vaccines, to the dismay of other nations. And some of the world’s most high-profile leaders have downplayed the pandemic, including Trump, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
All three were later infected by the virus themselves.
Alarmed by the apparent chaos, many world leaders used last month’s annual U.N. gathering to issue ringing calls for a return to the multilateralism that the world body has represented for 75 years.
Even before the pandemic, populist forces were pulling unity apart. Brexit was one symbol of the turn inward, along with restrictions against migrants in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. And trade wars among giants rumble on even as COVID-19 rocks economies around the world.
Weary of divisiveness, some on Friday leapt at the Nobel news to issue another urgent warning that unilateralism is bound to fail.
“Solidarity is precisely needed now to address not only the pandemic, but other global tests of our time,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.
“There is also a hunger in our world for international cooperation,” Guterres added. “The World Food Program feeds that need, too. WFP operates above the realm of politics, with humanitarian need driving its operations. The organization itself survives on voluntary contributions from U.N. member states and the public at large.”
That last part was a reminder that the WHO, in the midst of arguably the worst pandemic in a century, stands to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year if the U.S. follows on Trump’s intention to withdraw from itcompletely. The U.S. had been the health agency’s largest donor until Trump announced a halt to funding earlier this year.
The WFP chief, American David Beasley, in the glow of the Nobel win quickly turned to his cheering colleagues — representing a global collection of staffers, from Kyrgyzstan to Samoa — and said in his southern U.S. twang: “I didn’t win it, you won it.”
As the U.S. woke up Friday to the Nobel announcement, there was no immediate comment from Trump — who has said he would like to win the award himself.
___
Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this story.
WFP chief: Nobel Prize message to world not to forget Sahel
OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso (AP) — The head of the World Food Program said winning the Nobel Peace Prize while he was visiting the impoverished and war-weakened Sahel was a message to the world that it should not forget the region.
WFP Executive Director David Beasley spoke to reporters during a brief stop in Burkina Faso Friday, shortly after the agency won the Peace Prize for fighting hunger at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has driven millions more people to the brink of starvation.
“The fact that I was in the Sahel when we received the announcement is really a message from above that, hey world with all the things going on around the world today please don’t forget about the people in the Sahel!” said Beasley, who was in neighbouring Niger when he heard the news. “Please don’t forget about the people that are struggling and dying from starvation.”
Beasley said he was particularly concerned about Burkina Faso, which has faced a violent Islamic insurgency that’s cut off swaths of land and pushed millions of people to hunger. More than 3 million people in Burkina Faso are in need of emergency food aid, and some 11,000 people are facing famine conditions, according to the latest security report by the government and U.N. agencies.
“We can avert famine in Burkina Faso but we’ve got to have two things, money and access. Without both there’ll be famine,” he said.
He’s hoping the prize will propel donors, billionaires and people around the world to alleviate suffering, especially in the face of the coronavirus, which will have a “catastrophic” impact on next year’s funding, he said.
“2021 is screaming around the corner, there are no reserves, the economic downturn is taking place, the ripple effect to poor countries is devastating,” said Beasley.
Aid workers say the Peace Prize is a “timely recognition” of the importance of the WFP’s role in fragile countries like Burkina Faso, said Donald Brooks, chief executive officer for Initiative: Eau, a U.S. aid group focused on increasing the safety of drinking water in crisis zones.
Meanwhile, Burkina Faso’s government says it doesn’t have enough money to feed the more than 1 million internally displaced people. Boukare Ouedraogo, the mayor of Kaya town, which hosts nearly 500,000 displaced people, said the situation is so devastating it keeps him up at night.
“What makes me cry, what makes me not sleep, is to see these women, these children who are moving around and who come to knock on my door with a starving look saying that they have nothing to eat,” he said.