Konchowki: Food activists in India seem less excited over the World Food Programme (WFP) winning the Nobel Peace Prize for 2020.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee October 9 decided to award the United Nations food agency for its efforts to combat hunger and improve conditions for peace in areas affected by conflict. The prize will be presented in Oslo on December 10.

The Rome-based organization says it helps some 97 million people in about 88 countries each year, and that one in nine people worldwide still do not have enough to eat.

“I don’t know what the World Food Program has done. I only know that they run food aid programs. Do they talk about rights?” asks Anuradha Talwar, a Food Rights Activist and convener of Right To Food in West Bengal.

She also wants to know what the UN body has done to ensure human rights in the world.

She quoted the words of Brazilian Catholic Archbishop Helder Camara: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”

Talwar says the situation is the same in India now. “Basic rights for clean air, minimum food for survival, clean drinking water, shelter, clothing, education, and basic healthcare are missing for the vast majority in the country,” she points out.

According to her, it is the government’s responsibility to ensure these rights. “When the government ignores its basic responsibility, the civil society questions them. The government then brands them anti-national, urban Naxals (Maoists) and slap sedition charges on them and at times imprison them,” she bemoans.

Talwar was referring to the arrest of an 83-year-old Jesuit priest a day before the Nobel Peace Prize was announced.

India’s National Investigating Agency that arrested Father Stan Swamy accusing him of having Maoist links. The priest has worked among tribal communities in eastern India for 50 years.

Kavita Srivastava, one of the conveners of the Right To Food Campaign India, bemoans the existence of “the condition of denial” in India today.

She says she is worried about Father Swamy’s health condition that she has little time to welcome Nobel Prize for WFP. A court in Mumbai on October 9 sent the priest, who suffers from Parkinson disease, to judicial custody two weeks.

Some Indian activists have welcomed the Nobel for WFP.

“I welcome the Nobel Prize for the World Food Programme. It is a huge recognition that hunger and starvation exist in the world,” says Animesh Gomes, a food activist in West Bengal

According to him, the world has plenty to feed everyone, but exploitation and corruption drive many to starvation.

Gomes terms as a “curse” that wealth is not evenly distributed in the world.

WFP, he says, deserves the honour for combating hunger, bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and preventing the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.

While commending the WFP’s efforts end hunger, he points out that it is a UN body.

“Recognizing such an international body should not undermine many generous and altruistic individuals and groups all over the world who are doing to yeoman service to feed the hungry on a daily basis,” the member of the “Wada Na Todo Abhiyan” (Don’t break the promise campaign) told Matters India.

The campaign is a federation of NGOs that monitors the activities of the federal and state governments in India, asserts that “we need to recognize such heroes who are quietly working all around us today.”

Meanwhile, the Nobel committee said in its citation that the coronavirus pandemic has contributed “to a strong upsurge in the number of victims of hunger in the world.”

Berit Reiss-Andersen, chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, stressed the need for international solidarity and multilateral cooperation.

The WFP is a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which the WFP says could double hunger worldwide, has made it even more relevant, she told a press conference on October 9.

“Until the day we have a medical vaccine, food is the best vaccine against chaos,” she added.

The WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian organisation addressing hunger and promoting food security.

In 2019, it provided assistance to close to 100 million people in 88 countries who were victims of acute food insecurity and hunger.

In 2015, eradicating hunger was adopted as one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.