“It is inconceivable that hundreds of millions of people go to bed hungry every night,” laments Guterres
The humanitarian community unanimously applauded the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the World Food Program (WFP) this Friday, recalling the emergencies that hunger represents worldwide and its direct relationship with situations and contexts of conflict.
The Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres, said in a statement that, “in a world of plenty, it is inconceivable that hundreds of millions of people go to bed hungry every night.” Several million more “are now on the brink of famine due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” he lamented.
In this context, WFP workers avoid “danger” and “distance” to help those “who are not sure their next meal.” The agency, according to Guterres, “operates above the realm of politics, being guided by humanitarian needs.”
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Filippo Grandi, trusts that the award, “more than deserved”, will serve to highlight “the problem of food security for the most vulnerable”, while the director of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Qu Dongyu, applauded the recognition of “the importance of food security” and was “very proud” of WFP’s work.
Congratulations have also come from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as well as from the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who has expressed his “enormous admiration and respect “for the” vital “work that WFP does.
The general director of Action Against Hunger, Olivier Longué, sees a “success” that the Norwegian Committee “has focused its attention on hunger, an issue that despite not being fashionable, is one of the most cruel consequences of the pandemic “, especially when” the close links between hunger and the conflicts that exist today “are confirmed.
“Six out of ten hungry people live in countries in conflict. Hunger is increasingly used as a weapon of war, with indiscriminate sieges and attacks on fields of crops, water structures or storage of food and livestock, which threaten all principles of international humanitarian law, “Longué warned in a statement.
The NGOs Oxfam, Plan International and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) are also among those who have positively assessed the 2020 Nobel Prize. NRC Secretary General Jan Egeland has pointed out that “the work of humanitarian organizations has never been more important than in the extraordinary circumstances of 2020, “with a coronavirus pandemic that has only complicated all scenarios.
© 2020 Europa Press.
