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The UN World Food Program receives the award from the committee in Oslo. A highly respected choice. With the pandemic, the number of people dying of hunger has increased.
Oslo / Vienna. On Thursday, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) showed its usual energetic side. In crisis-ravaged Beirut, rocked by a loud explosion, the organization announced that it would quickly and easily pay cash to tens of thousands of people in need. For food, medication, baby food. WFP has been in place for weeks distributing flour and food packages.
A day later, the Nobel Committee in Oslo turned its attention to these efforts of humanitarian workers to fight hunger and to improve conditions in crisis regions: This year’s Nobel Peace Prize goes to the World Program of Food, a generally respected election of the committee, which includes several Send messages to the international community. Perhaps the most important: the global fight against hunger throughout the centuries is nowhere near winning.
Even more: the Covid-19 pandemic, ongoing armed conflicts like in Yemen, and the climate crisis have vastly increased the number of hungry people. Last year, WFP helped nearly 100 million people in need in 88 countries.
Now is not the first time that a UN organization has been honored with the highest peace award; Before that, the committee honored the Blue Helmets, the High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Children’s Fund. The current elections, however, come at a time when multilateralism is in a real crisis. The president of the Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, highlighted “the need for international solidarity and multilateral cooperation.”
Highest contributions from Austria
In addition, WFP is chronically underfunded. David Beasley, director of the organization, spoke recently that an additional $ 4.9 billion is needed to reach another 30 million people in need “who will die without WFP help.” The largest donors to the World Food Program are the United States, which contributed $ 2.7 billion this year (about 40 percent of the total donation), followed by Germany, the European Commission and Great Britain.
There was always a cut in contributions from the United States; Most recently, President Donald Trump had ended cooperation with the World Health Organization. But with former Republican Gov. Beasley, a good friend of Trump has so far opposed possible removals.
Austria is currently supporting WFP with € 4.6 million. As for the contribution for 2020, more financial support is being planned, according to the Austrian Development Agency (ADA). Austria’s contributions have been severely criticized repeatedly in recent years; Vienna appears on the list of donors among Sierra Leone, Burundi and Bangladesh, while countries like Denmark and Switzerland contribute more than 25 times more.
“We are speechless”
The Rome-based WFP was founded in 1961. The organization, with its current 15,000 employees, helped millions of people overcome the hunger crisis in Ethiopia, during the war in Yugoslavia and after the tsunami in Asia. At the moment, his work in Yemen, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo is of particular importance. “We are speechless,” tweeted the German WFP Twitter channel after the Nobel Prize news, “Peace and #Zero Hunger go hand in hand; without a safe diet there is no security.” David Beasley, the journalist in Niger on Friday, was also speechless and overwhelmed. accomplished.
