The manager director of the United Nations World Meals Program, which received the Nobel Peace Prize two years in the past, says he’ll step down on the finish of a six-year time period heading the world’s largest humanitarian group.

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David Beasley, a Republican, served one time period as South Carolina’s governor from 1995 to 1999. In a press release Saturday, Beasley mentioned he’ll exit his function on the conclusion of his time period in April 2023.

“Serving on this capability has been the best pleasure and deepest heartache of my life,” Beasley mentioned. “Due to the generosity of governments and people, we’ve fed so many thousands and thousands of individuals. However the actuality is we’ve not been in a position to feed all of them — and the tragedy of utmost starvation in a rich world persists.”

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Beasley was appointed to the U.N. submit in 2017 by then-U.S. President Donald Trump, and was beneficial for the job by Nikki Haley, one other former South Carolina governor. Haley additionally served because the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in the course of the Trump administration. Beasley succeeded Ertharin Cousin, an American lawyer and former U.S. ambassador.

The World Meals Program received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 for combating starvation and looking for to finish its use as “a weapon of warfare and battle” at a time when the coronavirus pandemic threatened to exacerbate hunger.

In March 2022, Beasley’s time period was prolonged below the Biden administration for an additional yr. In September, he mentioned that when he assumed his function in 2017, solely 80 million individuals world wide have been headed towards hunger. However local weather issues, the COVID-19 pandemic and the warfare in Ukraine elevated that quantity to 135 million.

The Rome-based World Meals Program was established in 1961 on the behest of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and has introduced support to a number of crises, together with Ethiopia’s famine of 1984, the Asian tsunami of 2004 and the Haiti earthquake of 2010.

Beasley mentioned the method to pick out his successor has already begun.