“Surprised, thrilled, humbled. All of those things,\u201d says Steven Were Omamo \u201988 MS of his reaction when the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last fall. An agricultural economist with a master\u2019s degree from the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources, Omamo is WFP\u2019s Country Director in Ethiopia. He leads a team of 850 relief and development workers, spread across 15 offices, who help feed some 8 million people a year.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re a big organization, but not as well-known as some,\u201d he says of the WFP, which is the food assistance branch of the U.N. \u201cIn many countries where we work, there are political sensitivities. We don\u2019t want to create hurdles for our delivery of food, so we tend to speak quietly. For the organization to be recognized was extraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n
If other agencies have higher profiles, few can match WFP\u2019s impact. It is the world\u2019s largest humanitarian organization, annually delivering some 3 million tons of food and over $2 billion worth of cash to well over 100 million people in 90 countries. Every day it sends thousands of trucks, ships, and planes into some of the most challenging places on Earth, many of them devastated by conflicts whose combatants use hunger as a weapon.<\/p>\n
In bestowing the Peace Prize, the Nobel committee drew explicit attention to the link between war and hunger, highlighting how one contributes to the other in a vicious cycle: strife disrupts food security, while scarcity can trigger conflict that flares into violence.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will never achieve the goal of zero hunger unless we also put an end to war,\u201d the Norwegian committee noted in its prize announcement. \u201cThe World Food Programme has taken the lead in combining humanitarian work with peace efforts through pioneering projects in South America, Africa, and Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n
Armed conflict is just one of several overlapping crises Omamo contends with in Ethiopia, where WFP partners with the government and other actors to keep millions of people from starvation. Recently one of his supply convoys disappeared while attempting to deliver humanitarian aid in the Tigray region, a mountainous area in the north of the country where the federal army and its allies have been battling rebel forces since November. The United Nations estimates the conflict has displaced more than a million people.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were three trucks,\u201d Omamo says. \u201cThey sent an SOS signal and for two hours, we couldn\u2019t contact them. Finally, we managed to raise them. They had been caught in a battle. They were not targets, but everything was unfolding in front of them.\u201d The relief workers escaped, and the mission would proceed another day. But the underlying conditions that drive hunger in many parts of Ethiopia \u2014 and around the globe \u2014 remain in place. In addition to war, Omamo says, these include climate shocks, gender inequity, chronic poverty, lack of local control of natural resources such as water, and now, economic deterioration due to the pandemic. \u201cI really believe that Ethiopia is at the center of the world,\u201d he says, \u201cin the sense that every issue you find around the world \u2014 both positive and less than positive \u2014 is expressed here at scale.\u201d<\/p>\n