Victoria B. Berg
World Food Programme, East Africa Regional Bureau
Nairobi, Kenya
Hello All,
My name is Victoria Berg and I am a second-year masters student in the Gallatin School concentrating in “Climate Change and Human Rights.” I have some experience in human rights outside of this fellowship and university, as I sit on the Steering Committee for UNICEF’s Next Generation at UNICEF USA. This position has made me an advocate for the rights of children worldwide. I would like to expand on these skills and experiences in order to advocate for the right to food security for all people.
I was also an intern at the Inter-Agency Standing Committee at the Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs at the United Nations this past semester. This position gave me valuable insight into how policy is created and implemented and how it shifts with feedback from programs in the field.
I look forward to increasing my ability to enact change this summer, when I will complete my fellowship at the World Food Programme (WFP), the food aid arm of the United Nations. Since its inception in 1961, the WFP has been working towards its vision of a world in which “every man, woman and child has access at all times to the food needed for an active and healthy life.”
I will be in Nairobi, Kenya, at the WFP’s Regional Bureau for East and Central Africa. My position is in the Vulnerability Assessment and Mapping unit, which provides “actionable food security information by combining traditional assessment methods with advanced and emerging technologies, to identify food insecure populations and to establish the underlying causes of food insecurity.”
Through my time at the WFP, I wish to acquire knowledge of how to create a call for reparations for climate change, using food security as a human rights issue. I feel as though this is a very timely project, as the “Four Famines” is currently causing death, suffering, displacement, and sorrow in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia. The UN has declared it the “largest humanitarian crisis since 1945” and estimates that 20 million people are at risk of starvation.
Climate change is a much discussed topic, but I personally feel as though it is often an after-thought. People and agencies tend to address a situation and then state that climate change is making said situation or problem worse without addressing climate change as the issue.
For me, what it ultimately comes down to is the international community’s accountability to the affected people. What are the steps that we take to ensure that those who are affected by climate change and famine get the help that they need in order to live their lives with dignity? This will be the main theoretical question that I attempt to answer this summer and throughout my career.