The World Food Programme’s peace prize may actually do some good

IN A TYPICAL year, one or two people might win the Nobel Peace prize. This year, 17,000 did. That is the number of employees at the World Food Programme, which was declared the winner of this year’s prize on October 9th. The prize was given to the organisation, a branch of the United Nations, for its work feeding some 100m people, passing over 317 other nominees including Greta Thunberg, a teenage Swedish climate-change activist, and Donald Trump, a septuagenarian American climate-change denier (the American president was never likely to win; he was nominated by a far-right member of the Norwegian parliament). The WFP’s boss, David Beasley, tweeted that he was “deeply humbled”.