Reiss-Andersen, who arrived at the ceremony in Oslo city hall on crutches, made no mention of Trump. Trump has been nominated for the 2021 prize, the White House says, for brokering an accord that resulted in the UAE and Bahrain normalising relations with Israel. 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. 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. This year, 318 nominees were known to be under consideration, 211 individuals and 107 organisations. The WFP responded by tweeting its thanks, adding: “This is a powerful reminder to the world that peace and #ZeroHunger go hand-in-hand.” The agency acted “as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict”, it said. In its citation, the committee praised the WFP for its “efforts for combating hunger” and its “contribution to creating peace in conflicted-affected areas”. The UN plays a key role in upholding human rights,” she said, adding: “Food is one of our most basic needs.” But the virus had strengthened the reasons for giving it to the WFP, including the need for “multilateralism” in a time of global crisis. She said the WFP would have been a worthy recipient of the prize without the coronavirus pandemic. The award was also a call to the international community to fund the UN agency adequately and to ensure people were not starving, she said. Hunger, she said, was used as a “weapon of war and conflict”. Reiss-Andersen said the committee gave the award to the WFP because it wanted to “turn the eyes of the world to the millions of people who suffer from or face the threat of hunger”.
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