: The World Food Programme Won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize. Here’s How the Pandemic Has Made Its Work Even More Essential #WorldNEWS The U. N. ’s World Food Program was awarded the 2020 Nobel

The World Food Programme Won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize. Here’s How the Pandemic Has Made Its Work Even More Essential #WorldNEWS
The U. N. ’s World Food Program was awarded the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, with the Norwegian Nobel Committee praising the agency’s “impressive ability to intensify its efforts” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian agency focused on hunger. It seeks to tackle both chronic food insecurity—the long-term lack of access to enough food, suffered by 690 million people in the world—and acute insecurity—periods of extreme hunger over a defined period of time. Earlier this year the agency warned that the number of people facing acute food insecurity is likely to double from 135 million to 265 million in 2020, in large part because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic has compounded the impact of conflicts, poverty and climate-related shocks that had already been driving up both chronic and acute hunger for the five years preceding 2020, Arif Husain, chief economist at the WFP, tells TIME. “We were already in a bad state,” he says. “But COVID-19 has created a kind of economic quicksand under people’s feet. If we don’t pull them out quickly, it takes people years – if not decades – to recover. ”

Here’s what to know about how hunger has worsened in the world in 2020.
How has the pandemic affected global food security?
Overall the world has enough food to feed the global population in 2020. The problem is getting it from where it is produced, to where it is needed. And the pandemic made that much more complicated.
The sudden implementation of lockdowns caused unprecedented ”fractures of supply chains right across the board,” says Jagjit Singh Srai, Co-Chair of the University of Cambridge’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Global Food Security. “You had a shock to the system in terms of supply, problems in harvesting food, and a loss of income and ability to purchase. ” In developed countries like Australia, travel bans during the pandemic meant migrant workers were unable to participate in harvests, leaving food rotting on the vine. A reliance on imported food in countries like the U. K. , coupled with panic buying at the start of the pandemic caused by fear of disruption, left grocery store shelves bare.
But the pandemic’s most severe impact on food security has been felt in developing countries. The loss of jobs, and remittances from their citizens living abroad have made people less able to afford food. The price of food has risen in some places, such as Sudan, due to economic disruption and inflation. From a supply chain point of view, Srai says, the “extreme fragmentation of markets in developing countries,” with trade generally divided among many retailers, has made it harder to combat the disruption.