They risk their lives to feed millions of people in some of the most dangerous places on the planet, but Friday offered a chance for World Food Programme staffers to feel some recognition for their work when their organisation won the Nobel Peace Prize.

"First of all everyone was quite shocked, and now a little bit overwhelmed by the whole thing," said WFP country director for South Sudan Matthew Hollingworth.

South Sudan is one of WFP's largest emergency humanitarian operations, its 1,200 field staff feeding some five million people -- nearly half the population -- in a country where deliberate starvation is used as a weapon of war, and famine is a constant threat.

It is the only country where WFP still drops food from planes due to the endemic conflict and difficulty of navigating the vast terrain.

"The staff are thrilled. No question," Hollingworth said of the award. "I'm incredibly proud to be working with them, to be honest."

The WFP provided food to some 97 million people across 88 countries last year, and is present in many of the world's deadliest war zones, including its biggest emergency operation in Yemen, where it aims to feed 13 million people every month.

"When I heard the news... I stopped breathing, I couldn't believe it," said Espinola Caribe of WFP's office in Mozambique, where they have been working to feed communities devastated by a monster cyclone last year.

He said he moved from office to office, congratulating and thanking his 50-odd staffers.

Caribe described a field trip last week to the areas worst-hit by the cyclone.

"It's a feeling you can't explain, you have to live it, seeing how our people are struggling to keep these people alive.

"Being in the frontline, being able to provide nutritional supplements and being able to keep this child alive... it's an amazing feeling," he said.

- 'The most vulnerable' -

The WFP's mission goes beyond food handouts, and includes educating families on child nutrition and helping them to become self-reliant.

In Turkey, where the WFP works with the government and other agencies to help Syrian refugees, it has recently expanded into providing vocational programmes -- training both Syrians and Turks in a bid to build social cohesion.

In the Central African Republic, the WFP feeds some 750,000 people every month.

The Nobel is a "recognition of all the work the WFP has done in the most difficult crises, the most vulnerable areas," said Vigno Hounkanli, communications director in the capital Bangui.

"Here we work in a very difficult context. The teams go to very remote places, often putting their lives at risk, and I'm thinking now of our colleagues who gave their lives to save others."

Mawa Coulibaly, 49, has been working in the CAR for seven years and is currently with a 15-strong team in the volatile northwest where brutal militias often target aid workers and peacekeepers.

She spoke of her "great pride" over the Nobel.

"I'm proud because I know the work we do to bring communities together," she said.

"The terrain is very difficult here," she added. "The roads are very bad and in the rainy season, it's very complicated. And we're on the border with Cameroon and Chad, so there are many robberies on the road."

World Food Programme: Five things to know
Rome (AFP) Oct 9, 2020 - The UN's World Food Programme, which won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize, delivers food assistance in emergencies, from wars to civil conflicts, natural disasters and famines.

Here are five facts about the Rome-based organisation:

- Beginnings -

Created in 1962 on the request of US President Dwight Eisenhower as an experiment to provide food aid through the UN system, WFP had only existed a few months when an earthquake struck northern Iran.

Over 12,000 people died. WFP sent survivors 1,500 metric tons of wheat, 270 tons of sugar and 27 tons of tea.

Others soon needed its help: a typhoon made landfall in Thailand; war refugees needed feeding in Algeria.

In 1963 WFP's first school meals project was born. In 1965, the agency became a fully-fledged UN programme.

By 2019, it would come to assist 97 million people in 88 countries. WFP says that on any given day it has 5,600 trucks, 30 ships and nearly 100 planes on the move. It distributes over 15 billion rations of food yearly.

- Mission -

WFP focuses on emergency assistance as well as rehabilitation and development aid. Two-thirds of its work is in conflict-affected countries, where people are three times more likely to be undernourished than elsewhere.

It works closely with the other two Rome-based UN agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which helps countries draw up policy and change legislation to support sustainable agriculture, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which finances projects in poor rural areas.

WFP is funded entirely by voluntary donations, most of which comes from governments. It raised $8 billion in 2019, which it says was used to provide 4.2 million metric tons of food and $2.1 billion of cash and vouchers.

It has more than 17,000 staff, with 90 percent based in the countries where the agency provides assistance.

- Where in the world? -

There are few places where the WFP has not provided assistance. In western Sahel in the 1970s, ravaged by drought, it used "everything in its power -- from car to camel, from road to river -- to assist those in need".

It delivered 2 million tons of food during Ethiopia's 1984 famine. It was present in Sudan, Rwanda, and in Kosovo, then later in Asia after the 2004 tsunami, and Haiti's 2010 earthquake.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which is suffering the second largest hunger crisis in the world, it assisted 6.9 million people in 2019, as well as helping fight a deadly Ebola virus outbreak.

It helps 4.5 million people in war-torn Syria and 300,000 acutely malnourished children in conflict-struck Nigeria.

But WFP's largest emergency response has been in Yemen, where it tries to feed 13 million people each month.

- Hunger today and coronavirus -

Over 821 million people in the world are chronically hungry, while another 135 million are facing severe hunger or starvation, and an additional 130 million could join them by the end of 2020 due to coronavirus, the agency warns.

The number of severely food insecure people in the world had already risen nearly 70 percent over the past four years, and the economic fallout from the virus pandemic is expected to spark "a hunger pandemic", WFP said.

"We urgently need more support from donors, who of course are already hard-pressed by the impact of the pandemic in their own countries".

- Coronavirus -

WFP's logistics services used a network of hubs, passenger and cargo airlinks, and medical evacuation services to enabled a steady flow of cargo and workers to the frontlines of the pandemic.

The coronavirus fallout is being felt hardest in Latin America, which has seen an almost three-fold rise in the numbers of people requiring food assistance, as well as West, Central and Southern Africa.

"Before the coronavirus even became an issue, I was saying that 2020 would be facing the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II," WFP's executive director David Beasley told the UN security council this year.

"With Covid-19, we are not only facing a global health pandemic but also a global humanitarian catastrophe".

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