The UN World Food Programme has been honored with the Nobel Peace Prize for 2020. WFP Executive Director David Beasley joins Prince Faisal bin Farhan, Minister of Foreign Affairs Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in assessing the rising threat of global hunger.
The resurgence of hunger is one of the greatest problems we face today. A toxic mix of widespread civil war, poverty, and COVID-19 threatens to bring mass starvation on an unprecedented scale. Sadly, ending hunger and malnutrition is the one UN Sustainable Development Goal on which we have failed to make progress in recent years.
The World Food Programme has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2020 for "its efforts to combat hunger, for its contributions to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-afflicted areas, and for acting as a driving force to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict."
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has long advocated for global attention to food security issues. At the recent G20 meeting hosted in the Kingdom, members committed to greater investments in agricultural development. At various moments in history when WFP faced major funding shortfalls, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia came to the rescue of the people most in need by making significant contributions. On two occasions, in the 1970s and during the sharp rise in food prices in 2008, the Kingdom made the largest cash donations to WFP by a single donor up to those dates which helped WFP implement programmes aimed at lessening the impact on its beneficiaries. In 2019, the Kingdom was WFP’s fifth largest donor through support provided through the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center. Last year alone, the Kingdom invested $440 million in food assistance and agricultural development in 36 countries worldwide, with the main focus being support to WFP in Yemen for the past 5 years.
While starvation in conflict zones easily draws attention in the media, chronic hunger does not. There are so many drivers behind it: poverty, discrimination, environmental degradation, and insufficient investment in agriculture. With each passing year, climate change inflicts more harm on farmers as they struggle to cope with rising temperatures and cruel cycles of flood and drought. After harvest, an astonishing 1.3 billion metric tons of food simply go to waste each year.
Add COVID-19 to the global hunger equation and we could soon see another pandemic -- a hunger pandemic as brutally relentless as the virus itself. COVID-19 has taken over 1.5 million lives already. If we allow it to create a second pandemic of hunger and malnutrition, the cost in lives lost will be far more devastating. Hunger and malnutrition are already efficient killers taking the lives of over 3 million children under 5 each year. We cannot allow the spread of COVID-19 to add fuel to that fire.
The COVID-19 pandemic has eaten into harvests, disrupted supply chains, and decimated the incomes of tens of millions of households. Where food is available, each day more people lack the money to buy it. All told, 270 million people may find themselves in an extreme hunger crisis in 2021 including some 30 million people who are already at the brink of starvation.
The Way Forward
First, we must press all parties to honor the UN Secretary-General's call for a global ceasefire, which is consistent with the Kingdom's policy focused on peace as its strategic choice and one of the most important pillars of its foreign policy. If most hunger stems from politics, we need political solutions. Brokering peace will not only curb outbreaks of hunger in war zones, it will help stem the surge of refugees and economic migrants now overwhelming many host countries.
Second, we must pre-position food in the most vulnerable regions by year's end. This is not just a task for governments. We all must help. If there was ever a time to share, it is now.
Third, we must take a strategic approach to aid working in tandem and with a true spirit of collaboration. "Smart funding" through multi-year and multi-sector donations can help donors have a broad impact beyond containing emergencies. Better targeting of aid to focus more on women and girls would surely pay off, as they are most often the victims of malnutrition. It is not enough for us to save lives if we do not fundamentally change lives.
Finally, we must build resilience in societies so they can better withstand shocks like COVID-19 in the future. We must start with youth. School closures have ended school meals for 370 million school children around the world and WFP, Saudi Arabia, and other donors are already providing food assistance to help strengthen nutrition and prevent disease among them. We cannot let a generation in the developing world become collateral damage in this pandemic -- malnourished and uneducated, with little hope of leading productive lives.
If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is empathy. Even in wealthy nations, families with jobs one day could find themselves relying on government aid or food banks the next. Tens of millions in the developed world today no longer take food for granted and share the worries of the world's poor in a way we never imagined possible. Perhaps in the pain COVID-19 has thrust upon us, we can finally come together and work towards building a world without hunger.
