A UN envoy said on Monday that United States is not fulfilling its part of responsibility in addressing the food crisis in Africa which has gripped the continent and left millions of people wallowing in poverty.

UN Special Advisor on Millennium Development Goals Prof. Jeffrey Sachs said the 5 billion U.S. dollars worth of aid per year in Africa is the lowest to the Western world and is barely enough to address the agricultural programs for Africa.

Addressing a news conference in Nairobi, Sachs, who is also director of Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York said that Washington is channeling only 1 percent of its Gross National product towards Africa's food needs.

"Wars in the world are caused by crises of hunger and armies cannot solve these wars as long as people in wastelands are hungry," Sachs told journalists. "As long as there are people in want of food, the world will not be safe."

The expert hoped that the new U.S. administration will address the variance.

He pledged to assist Kenya in mobilizing emergency support that will include assistance to small scale farmers and pastoralists to raise productivity at a summit to be held in Madrid next week.

"Our donor communities tend to focus on these things that are symptoms, rather than deeper causes and practical solutions.

While in Kenya, Professor Sachs visited the MDG Project in Sauri in the Western Kenya where he said that the living standards of people have been improved.

"Harvests have increased from 1.5 tones per hectare to between four and five tones while school attendance has seen a dramatic improvement. Electricity has seen the spread of internet connectivity and mobile phone use. Three new health centers have come up, reducing malaria prevalence in the process," he said.

Sachs said that the multi-million shilling maize scandal, which has left over 100,000 bags of the cereal missing from the country's strategic grain reserves, is not to blame for the current food crisis in the country.

He said the crisis is a result of underproduction by small scale farmers, global climate change and disruption of the main planting season following last year's post election crisis.

"It's very hard to keep prices away from their market equilibrium and if they are very high because of food supply shortages, then you try to put a partial subsidy on the grain. It leaks in a hundred different ways and you end up with corruption because it's very hard to beat the market," Sachs said.

"This is not the cause of the food crisis, but is a manifestation. I think it is very important for donors to understand that this is a crisis of insufficient food supply and of desperately hungry and poor people," he said.

"The government tried to respond by keeping the price below the market equilibrium, which is very high, but it did not succeed in doing so," said Sachs.

Source: Xinhua