“We’re a big organization, but not as well-known as some,” he says of the WFP, which is the food assistance branch of the U.N. “In many countries where we work, there are political sensitivities. We don’t want to create hurdles for our delivery of food, so we tend to speak quietly. For the organization to be recognized was extraordinary.”

If other agencies have higher profiles, few can match WFP’s impact. It is the world’s largest humanitarian organization, annually delivering some 3 million tons of food and over $2 billion worth of cash to well over 100 million people in 90 countries. Every day it sends thousands of trucks, ships, and planes into some of the most challenging places on Earth, many of them devastated by conflicts whose combatants use hunger as a weapon.

In bestowing the Peace Prize, the Nobel committee drew explicit attention to the link between war and hunger, highlighting how one contributes to the other in a vicious cycle: strife disrupts food security, while scarcity can trigger conflict that flares into violence.

“We will never achieve the goal of zero hunger unless we also put an end to war,” the Norwegian committee noted in its prize announcement. “The World Food Programme has taken the lead in combining humanitarian work with peace efforts through pioneering projects in South America, Africa, and Asia.”

Armed conflict is just one of several overlapping crises Omamo contends with in Ethiopia, where WFP partners with the government and other actors to keep millions of people from starvation. Recently one of his supply convoys disappeared while attempting to deliver humanitarian aid in the Tigray region, a mountainous area in the north of the country where the federal army and its allies have been battling rebel forces since November. The United Nations estimates the conflict has displaced more than a million people.

“There were three trucks,” Omamo says. “They sent an SOS signal and for two hours, we couldn’t contact them. Finally, we managed to raise them. They had been caught in a battle. They were not targets, but everything was unfolding in front of them.” The relief workers escaped, and the mission would proceed another day. But the underlying conditions that drive hunger in many parts of Ethiopia — and around the globe — remain in place. In addition to war, Omamo says, these include climate shocks, gender inequity, chronic poverty, lack of local control of natural resources such as water, and now, economic deterioration due to the pandemic. “I really believe that Ethiopia is at the center of the world,” he says, “in the sense that every issue you find around the world — both positive and less than positive — is expressed here at scale.”

Omamo’s own career has taken him all over the world. He has served as director of global engagement and research with the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development, senior research fellow and coordinator of the Eastern Africa Food Policy Network with the International Food Policy Research Institute, and director of policy and advocacy with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. From 2006 to 2012, he was deputy director of policy, planning, and strategy at the World Food Programme’s headquarters in Rome. There he helped create and launch the Purchase for Progress initiative, a program that leveraged the enormous buying power of the WFP to support economic resilience in rural communities.

“The idea was that since we buy so much food around the world, we could target smallholder farmers with our purchases and so create sustainable markets for their produce,” explains Omamo. Implemented in 2008, the program has become an operational model for WFP. It now is embedded in three dozen countries, connecting more than a million smallholders to valuable markets.

Wherever his work has brought him, Omamo has continued to feel the strong pull of Africa. “I really do relate to issues facing Africa and Africans,” he says. “I’ve always been drawn back for that reason.”

In Ethiopia those issues include recurrent drought, chronic undernutrition, limited access to health services and education, as well as the armed conflict emphasized by the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Additionally, the country shelters one of the largest refugee populations on the continent — some 750,000 men, women, and children displaced by political and climate shocks in neighboring Eritrea, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan. Together the crises threaten to upend a two-decade period of steady economic development that began after the end of the Ethiopian-Eritrean War in 2000.

To meet the challenges, Omamo directs a two-pronged response the WFP calls “saving lives and changing lives.” The first part is crisis mediation, the work of distributing food to communities pushed to the brink of starvation by natural and manmade disasters. This involves everything from running school feeding operations to providing logistical support for Ethiopian government relief efforts to building humanitarian cargo hubs and even Covid field hospitals. The second pillar, the transformational part, addresses the root causes of hunger by supporting economic development, farming, and sustainable growth.

“What we try to do is give vulnerable communities opportunities to enter into the transformation,” Omamo says. “Helping them manage natural resources, giving them access to markets, giving them new platforms, sharing new information or new financial instruments.”

Despite the many complex issues, Omamo believes there is cause for optimism. He describes meeting an old man while in Kenya a number of years ago and asking him about his life. The man marveled at how easy in his lifetime it had become to move around. When he was young, he told Omamo, he couldn’t go anywhere because his village was always fighting the village next door.

“It’s easy to become dejected,” Omamo says. “But the transformation is happening. Opportunities are always coming, in agriculture, in technology, in the penetration of markets. It’s profound. Even in the most devastated community, you go there and you find people who are planting. They’re looking ahead, trying to start again.
It is humbling.”