Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination (Topic: Food for Peace)

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Food for Peace

Nobel Peace Prize for 2020 has been awarded to the World Food Programme (WFP), of the United Nations (UN) system, for its contribution to combating hunger in conflict and disaster-struck sites.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee took note of the WFP’s life-saving role in the year of the pandemic, staving off catastrophes of hunger in Yemen, Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan and Burkina Faso.

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.
Other UN agencies that work towards providing food security include the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
The decision to honour the WFP echoes the advice of another peace laureate from 1949, Lord John Boyd Orr, the first head of the FAO that peace cannot be built on empty stomachs.
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.”
The recognition that the WFP has received can help the humanitarian organisation prepare for a decade of ambition and help meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Of central importance is SDG 2 — achieving zero hunger by 2030.

The WFP, which was established in 1961 at the behest of the US president Dwight Eisenhower, is the world’s largest humanitarian organisation committed towards its global goal of ending hunger by the year 2030. Eisenhower proposed to the UN General Assembly on September 1, 1960, that a, “workable scheme should be devised for providing food aid through the UN system.”
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.
WFP runs entirely on public donations and was able to raise over $8 billion last year. Its donors include governments, corporations and individuals.
The cash-based transfers were launched for the first time in 2005 in response to the tsunami in Sri Lanka.
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.

In 2019, the WFP provided assistance to close to 100 million people in 88 countries who are victims of acute food insecurity and hunger.
In 2019, 135 million people suffered from acute hunger, the highest number in many years. Most of the increase was caused by war and armed conflict.
The coronavirus pandemic has contributed to a strong upsurge in the number of victims of hunger in the world.
In countries such as Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan and Burkina Faso, the combination of violent conflict and the pandemic has led to a dramatic rise in the number of people living on the brink of starvation.
The World Food Programme was an active participant in the diplomatic process that culminated in May 2018 in the UN Security Council’s unanimous adoption of Resolution 2417, which for the first time explicitly addressed the link between conflict and hunger.