The most devastating conflict of the 20th century, even arguably of all known history, was the Second World War. The war and its aftermath saw large-scale hunger and privation across all of Europe and other parts of the world that the conflict had touched, on a scale hitherto unknown.
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It was against this backdrop that one of the war's most decorated Allied Generals spoke these words. “The children of today are forming each day the mental concepts, the mental prejudices, the emotions, that are going to rule and govern them through their lifetime; and over at least half of the year, they are hungry. In many instances, in many countries, almost universally, they are going in packs, up and down alleys, they are searching for a garbage heap in which they find all too little of any kind of sustenance that will keep them alive. Every man here who served with me in Europe has witnessed this with his own eyes. How can we expect children, who are reduced almost to an animal-like level of existence, struggling each day for any kind of scrap that will keep them alive, how can we expect them to develop the ideas and the ideals that in the future will bring them to be apostles of peace. They are, by the very nature of the struggle they are carrying on, wedded to the philosophy of force, whatever they get, they get by their own efforts and by scratching in the garbage heap. That cannot go on if we are to have peace.” This was the kernel of a stirring speech made by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1948, to the UN General Assembly.
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Eisenhower's experience as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, which landed on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 and ultimately oversaw the final phase of the war in western Europe that ended with Germany’s defeat, had given him a unique insight into the deadly privations the devastating conflict had wrought on children in almost every country on the continent. It was this experience that forged his conviction that childhood hunger and peace were incompatible.
In 1960, Eisenhower, who was by now into his second term as President of the United States, again focussed an address to the UN on global hunger and proposed that the UN spearhead the creation of a multilateral effort to provide food aid wherever it was needed. “The United States is already carrying out substantial programmes to make its surpluses available to countries of greatest need. My country is also ready to join with other members of the UN in devising a workable scheme to provide food to member states through the UN system, relying on the advice and assistance of the Food and Agriculture Organization,” he told the UN General Assembly. This proposal was then brought to fruition in 1961, when another American Second World War veteran, George McGovern, led the efforts of President John F. Kennedy's administration at the UN to help establish the World Food Programme (WFP) — the winner this month of the Nobel Peace Prize. Within months of its creation, in September 1962, the WFP faced its first test. A deadly earthquake in northern Iran had claimed the lives of more than 12,000 people and rendered tens of thousands homeless and desperate for succour. The UN’s infant agency flew in 1,500 tonnes of wheat, 270 tonnes of sugar and 27 tonnes of tea, marking its baptism.
By 1965, the experimental agency with an initial mandate of three years had proved its worth to the world after responding to multiple crises and was enshrined as a fully fledged UN programme: it is to last for “as long as multilateral food aid is found feasible and desirable”.
Largest operation
The next two decades saw the organisation facing some of its sternest tests in terms of the scale of humanitarian crises it had to address. From the famines in the Sahel in northern Africa in the 1970s to the famine in Ethiopia in 1984 and the conflict in southern Sudan in the late 1980s, the WFP learnt to marshal resources as varied as camel caravans and flotilla of cargo planes provided by national air forces. “In 1989, Operation Lifeline Sudan is launched: leading a consortium of UN agencies and charities alongside UNICEF, WFP releases 1.5 million tonnes of food into the skies above what has since become South Sudan. The dawn-to-dusk, 20-aircraft, three-sorties-a-day airdrop remains, to this day, the largest in history. It saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” the WFP says on its website.
In the six decades since its founding, the WFP has now grown to become the world’s largest humanitarian agency, providing aid to almost 100 million people in more than 80 countries. Commanding one of the biggest non-military and non-commercial logistics operations worldwide, the Rome-headquartered agency on any given day has up to 5,600 trucks, 30 ships and almost 100 aircraft engaged in delivering food and other assistance to those needing aid as well as developmental support, including in some of remotest and often conflict-stricken parts of the globe.
The organisation has widened its operational remit and is now a leading provider of not just emergency food aid but also an agency engaged in supporting the nutritional requirements of communities through food assistance programmes. These vary from supporting school meals projects in different countries, including India, to the provision of cash and vouchers as a complement to in-kind food distributions.
While theatres of conflict remain the largest areas of widespread deprivation and hunger, the WFP’s interventions have been witnessed in the wake of multiple natural disasters: the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and closer home Nepal’s devastating temblor five years ago.
The organisation has also honed its response capabilities to the point where it is able to serve as the frontline telecommunications and logistical support provider to all UN agencies and NGOs in any crisis situation — from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa to the Nepali earthquake of 2015.
Not free from criticism
For an agency funded entirely by donors ranging from governments, companies and individuals, the WFP has had to face its share of criticism. These range from charges that the aid it provides encourages corruption among local politicians and officials, who often sell the food supplies in the black market hurting local farmers and traders, to complaints that it destabilises whatever rudimentary market conditions that may be prevailing by making it hard for small local producers to compete.
But with conflicts still raging from Syria to Yemen and Afghanistan, communities threatened by climate change and the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic pushing millions more to the brink of starvation, as the WFP’s executive director David Beasley says in a statement acknowledging the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize: “Every one of the 690 million hungry people in the world today has the right to live peacefully and without hunger. Without peace, we cannot achieve our global goal of zero hunger; and while there is hunger, we will never have a peaceful world.”
