A Prize for Waging War on Hunger

Context: Nobel Peace prize to World Food Programme recognises hunger as a violation of human rights.

Steps taken to fight the global food crisis

• UN Security Council Resolution 2417: It recognised the need to “break the vicious cycle between armed conflict and food insecurity.”

• Added credence to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 2): of eradicating hunger adopted by the UN in 2015.

• 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to the World Food Programme (WFP) - one of the largest humanitarian organisations addressing hunger and promoting food security.

• The Nobel committee stressed the link between armed conflict and hunger.
• It draws attention to the sustained efforts to fight hunger and famine from the grass-roots to the highest levels of global governance. 

Factors affecting hunger Worldwide

• War or armed conflict: Almost 80 % of all chronic malnourished children inhabit countries affected by armed conflict. 

• Wars constrain people’s mobility, create black markets and restrict people’s access to food, making it either unavailable or too expensive. 

• War-related displacement causes people to be removed from their cultivable land, and war parties often withhold food as a weapon of war.

• Pandemic: Ongoing pandemic has exacerbated the problem of food insecurity and famines; the number of hungry people could increase to 270 million under the impact of the pandemic.

Challenges to the alleviation of Hunger in India: Hunger has been India’s bane since colonial times.

• State Induced Famines in Colonial Times: The Bengal and other British Era famines have been debated to be man-made, induced by state actors, through either their action or non-action.

• Food insecurity during the early years of Independence: only 10% of the cultivated area had access to irrigation, and mineral fertilisers were an unaffordable luxury.

• The lack of domestic food production continued to be supplemented by importing grains from all over the world
• Ineffective Green Revolution: Food grain production increased drastically since the late 1960s, but acute hunger crisis, famines and malnourishment were reported regularly, along with farmer suicides. 
• Problems with state policies and lack of accountability: in dealing with the food crisis.
• Impact of the Pandemic: Ever since the lockdown was introduced and millions of daily-wage earners lost their livelihood, giving rise to massive reverse migration and starvation.

• Impact of climate change: The impact of climate change on the future of crop production is not even fully known yet, and occurrences of natural disasters have increased.

Conclusion: Food crisis is slow violence on vulnerable populations that will weigh on our collective conscience; we must recognise hunger as the ultimate violation of basic human rights and dignity.