On the World Day of Peace, January 1, the Deputy Director of the United Nations World Food Program, the Indian Manoj Juneja, gave his testimony. “The Nobel Peace Prize is a call to action – he tells us – funding is needed immediately to prevent the health pandemic from being followed by a hunger pandemic in 2021.” He agrees with the Pope to use arms money to feed “the most vulnerable.”

“Food is an instrument of peace: as the World Food Program, we feed 17 million children in school, we employ farmers so that they build canals to irrigate their fields and roads to reach the market and sell their products. All this creates paths of peace.” Thus Juneja recalls why the Nobel Prize 2020 went to the United Nations agency.

That’s why WFP-PAM (World Food Program-Programme Alimentaire Mondial) is with Pope Francis when he says that “no one must be left behind” and calls for fighting waste and inequality by creating a global fund to eliminate hunger with money used for weapons. “A small percentage of expenditures” such as military budgets, used “to reduce the suffering of the most vulnerable,” agrees Deputy Director Juneja “could bring us to the goal of ‘Zero Hunger’ ” (set by the UN for 2030, ed.).

Source: Alessandro Di Bussolo, Vatican News