The coronavirus pandemic has forced the organizers of the Nobel Prize to cut back on the traditional festivities to a bare minimum. Unlike the previous years, when the ceremony had lavish banquets and royal attendees, this time, it is going to be an online event.
The 2020 Nobel Peace Prize will be presented to the World Food Programme (WFP) on Thursday. The executive director of WFP, David Beasley, will be presented the Nobel gold medal and diploma at the organization’s Rome headquarters in a ceremony broadcast online at 1 pm (1200 GMT). The ceremony will be broadcast on the WFP’s Facebook page, YouTube and the Nobel Prize website, among others.
“This year has been difficult for us, as it has been for many others as well. It’s a shame that the laureate misses out on the usual magic but there’s nothing we can do about that,” the director of the Nobel Institute, Olav Njolstad, told AFP on the eve of the ceremony.
WFP, which was founded in 1961, is the food-assistance branch of the United Nations that feeds tens of millions of people each year across the world.
When the winner for this year’s prize was announced in October, Nobel committee chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen had said that the WFP was being honored for its efforts “to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.”
The Nobels are presented on December 10 every year to mark the anniversary of the 1896 death of prize founder Alfred Nobel, a Swedish scientist and philanthropist. This year, only Reiss-Andersen will take part in the event. She will be online from inside the walls of the Nobel Institute in Oslo.
Despite this year’s scaled-back format, Njolstad tried to see things from the bright side.
“It’s very possible that, paradoxically, more people than usual will watch the prize ceremony since we’ve gone to so much effort to be present online,” he said.
