Is the World Food Program’s Nobel Peace Prize a Premature Victory Lap?
Executive Director of the United Nation’s World Food Program during a press briefing from late 2018 (WSB-TV Atlanta).
By Matthias Wu
The World Food Program (WFP), a subdivision of the UN Development Group, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize of 2020. Global efforts to eliminate starvation are emphasized by the “zero hunger” part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, a sustainable development framework that has gained momentum across the international community. As such, food-assistance has been fundamental to crisis response. Being the largest humanitarian organization of the world, the WFP provided food assistance to over 97 million people in 88 countries in 2019, with more than 15 billion rations.
The agency is charged with a seemingly insurmountable task: leading the global eradication of hunger by 2030. Its operations are continuously impacted by budgetary shortfalls, ever-changing geopolitical tides, and as of recent, the COVID-19 pandemic. Underneath the spotlight there are bitter realities for the WFP, a Nobel Peace Prize at this time, might not be what WFP needs the most.
A pandemic may mean public health crisis and economic downturn for the West, but it could mean grave consequences for the Global South, including social instability, deteriorated living standards, political turmoil and power-grabbing. The pandemic has undone many years of progress on poverty reduction. Amid the pandemic, the percentage of people in extreme poverty, currently defined by living on under $1.90 per day, had rebounded for the first time since 1998. Back in May, the WFP forecasted that there might be “a doubling of acute hunger by the end of 2020.” David Beasely, a former American politician and current executive director of the WFP, went as far as predicting that there might come famines “of biblical proportions.”
The WFP cited an estimated need for an additional $5 billion to avert famines in the short term. As the agency operates almost entirely on donation, it has urged the world to act. “This is a call to action to the world to step up — especially the billionaires who are making billions of dollars in COVID,” Beasely commented over the significant financial strain facing the WFP.
The effectiveness and ethics of aid has been contentiously debated from the very beginning, not to mention that the diminishing willingness or incentives of the West to provide aid, as it is similarly in the swamp of the pandemic. Still, it can be argued that food assistance and similar programs might be the most direct and effective measure to ameliorate the rapidly increasing destitution during a time of crisis like the current pandemic. The truth is, not many players are acting in a similar capacity as the WFP. Western donation is strained by the pandemic recession and the national governments of the Global South have even more limited power to avert disastrous outcomes.
For many in the US, food insecurity and malnutrition seem like a thing of the past, as most associate them with the Great Depression, religious charities, or the heydays of USAID. Many people in their twenties or thirties, especially in the Global North, had not experienced an age dominated by hunger. It was estimated that before 1970, on average, over 1 million people die from famine annually , and that is only to count those died in massive, acute food crises. Hunger-reduction has seen significant progress over the past few decades, from 1970 annual death from famines has seen a steady decrease, hovering around 0.17 million per year before the pandemic. However, what proved to be perilous today is the inability for many in the Global North to reconcile the coexistence of modern, tech-savvy societies on the one hand, and a world of famines on the other. The rebound of severe food insecurity amid the COVID-19 pandemic cautioned that hunger is not simply a function of wars or natural disasters, nor an inevitable symptom only for the unfortunate majority living in abusive and reactionary regimes. Where the food insecurity crisis heads in the future, also depends on how effective the response of the international community is. One disaster is compounding the other, yet it should not obscure the true state of food security today. The world must stay vigilant.
Perhaps previously over-shadowed by other UN and international agencies like the WHO or UNICEF, the WFP’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize comes as a grim and somewhat ironic reminder: the highest honors and global media attention is sometimes easier to earn than $6.8 billion of funding, the amount the agency said it needed for continuous operation in the next six months.
Against a backdrop of the increased appearance of isolationism in the West and the growing politicization of foreign aid, the call for donation from agencies like WFP appears rather unsurprisingly futile. Nonetheless, concerns have been invariably placed on the future of global food security. The WFP’s struggle warns that intensified starvation may be a greater threat to lives and livelihood in many countries than the pandemic itself. As a vaccine against COVID still lacks a definitely roll-out timeframe, the best vaccine for suffering currently is food.
