It is the highlight of the annual Nobel Prize announcements: when the world’s most prestigious peace prize is awarded, the world looks to Oslo for a moment. There they are honoring a UN organization that has dedicated itself to the fight against hunger. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize goes to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced this on Friday in Oslo.
The UN organization will be honored for its efforts in the fight against hunger and its contribution to the improvement of peace conditions in conflict areas, said the chairman of the committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, at the announcement of the award. The WFP is a crucial force in efforts to create peace in conflict regions.
As the largest humanitarian organization in the world, the World Food Program supplied almost 100 million people in 88 countries with food in 2019. The WFP is able to reach regions that are difficult to access, for example in Syria or Yemen, explained the Nobel Committee.
In the coronavirus pandemic, the number of starving people rose sharply. “Until the day we have a medical vaccine, food is the best vaccine against chaos,” said Reiss-Andersen. The World Food Program played a crucial role in making food security a tool of peace.
“This is a proud moment,” said WFP spokesman Tomson Phiri. He was in the middle of a press conference covering the work of the WFP in Sudan when the prize was announced. The award is a recognition of both the employees and the many volunteers around the world. “We delivered again this year and did more than our duty,” he said.
Despite the worldwide travel restrictions, the WFP supplied hungry people. “We were the largest airline in the world at one point,” he said. The WFP chartered planes after it stopped flying commercial flights that normally carry a lot of material for the WFP.
The Nobel Prizes are named after the Swedish chemist and inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). In his will he stated that his estate would become the financial basis for five international prizes in the fields of physics, chemistry, literature, medicine and peace. In 1968, a business award was also launched in memory of Nobel.
According to Nobel’s last will, the Peace Prize is to be awarded to those who have done the best work for greater brotherhood between nations, abolished the military or organized peace congresses.
While four Nobel Prizes are awarded by Swedish Nobel Committees, the founder also determined that the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate would be chosen by five members of the Norwegian Parliament. The amount of the prize money depends on the current assets of the Nobel Foundation. When it was first awarded, it was 150,800 Swedish kronor. This year the award is endowed with ten million crowns (around 950,000 euros).
Particularly famous winners of the Nobel Peace Prize were Nelson Mandela (1993), Barack Obama (2009), Mother Teresa (1979) and Albert Schweitzer (1952). In 2017 he went to the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
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Last year, the Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was honored, who was honored above all for his initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighboring Eritrea.
More than 300 candidates were in the running for Abiy’s successor. According to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, 211 personalities and 107 organizations had been nominated for this year’s prize on time. This corresponds to the fourth highest number of nominations ever, but is well below the peak of 376 nominees in 2016.
In contrast to the other Nobel Prize winners, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate is not announced in Stockholm, but in Oslo. There it will actually be presented on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of dynamite inventor and award sponsor Alfred Nobel. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this time it is unclear whether the award winner can travel to Norway or will be digitally connected to the award ceremony. The award ceremony will not take place as usual in Oslo City Hall, but on a much smaller scale in the auditorium of the city’s university. (KNA, dpa)