World Food Programme of UN gets Nobel Peace Prize 2020
This year, 318 nominees were known to be under consideration, 211 individuals and 107 organisations
The 2020 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the World Food Programme for its efforts to combat hunger and to improve conditions for peace in conflict areas.
The chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, revealed the 2020 laureate at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, reports The Guardian.
The usual throng of reporters in attendance was drastically reduced coronavirus restrictions in the programme.
This year, 318 nominees were known to be under consideration, 211 individuals and 107 organisations.
Other figures who were considered in the running for this year's prize included the 17-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, the Russian dissident and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, recovering from a nerve agent attack he blames on the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the World Health Organization for its role in addressing the coronavirus pandemic.
The US president, Donald Trump, has said he should have won last year's peace prize, which went to Ethiopia's prime minister, Abiy Ahmed after he forged a peace deal with Eritrea.
Trump has been nominated for the 2021 prize, the White House says, for brokering an accord which saw the UAE and Bahrain normalise relations with Israel.
One hundred Nobel peace prizes have been awarded since 1901, to individuals and 24 organisations. While the other Nobel prize laureates are announced in Stockholm, the peace prize is awarded in the Norwegian capital, Oslo.
Along with enormous prestige, the prize comes with a 10m kronor (£870,000) cash award and a gold medal to be handed out at a ceremony in Oslo on 10 December the anniversary of the prize founder Alfred Nobel's death. This year's ceremony will be scaled down due to the pandemic.
Nominations can be made by a select group, including national lawmakers, heads of state and certain international institutions.
On Monday, the Nobel committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus. Tuesday's prize for physics honoured breakthroughs in understanding the mysteries of cosmic black holes, and the chemistry prize on Wednesday went to scientists behind a powerful gene-editing tool. The literature prize was awarded to the American poet Louise Glück on Thursday for her "candid and uncompromising" work.
Still to come next week is the prize for outstanding work in the field of economics.
