October 9, 2020: The World Food Programme (WFP) has won the 2020 Nobel peace prize for its efforts to combat hunger and to improve conditions for peace in conflict areas.

The Nobel Prize Committee took to Twitter to announce the winner: "The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to the World Food Programme (WFP)."

The chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen said the committee gave the award to the WFP because it wanted to “turn the eyes of the world to the millions of people who suffer from or face the threat of hunger”. Hunger, she said, was used as a “weapon of war and conflict”.

The award was also a call to the international community to fund the UN agency adequately and to ensure people were not starving, she said. She said the WFP would have been a worthy recipient of the prize without the coronavirus pandemic. But the virus had strengthened the reasons for giving it to the WFP including the need for “multilateralism” in a time of global criss.

The Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to a strong upsurge in the number of victims of hunger in the world. In the face of the pandemic, 2020 Nobel Prize laureate the World Food Programme has demonstrated an impressive ability to intensify its efforts.

2020 Nobel Prize laureate, the World Food Programme, plays a key role in multilateral cooperation on making food security an instrument of peace, and has made a strong contribution towards mobilising UN Member States to combat the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.