Kerry to Africa: 8,000 children starve to death every day, but don't build any more farms - because 'global warming'

This week, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke at the U.S.-Africa Summit and delivered what may be the most heartless bit of advice ever to come from an official representative of the United States. Kerry acknowledges that, around the world, one in eight people suffer from chronic hunger. In sub-Saharan Africa, he claims that number rises to one in four.

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Despite the dying children, Kerry wants to make sure nobody builds any more farms. Oh sure, that might feed a lot of people. However, according to Kerry, it would also release a lot of nasty stuff into the atmosphere. That, in turn, could lead to global cooling global warming "climate change." We don't want that!

"Certain agricultural processes can actually release carbon pollution and actually contribute to the problem in the first place. It's a twisted circle. Always complicated. But we also know that there are certain ways to change that. For example, rather than convert natural areas to new farmland, a process that typically releases significant amounts of carbon pollution, we can, instead, concentrate our efforts on making existing farmlands more productive."

Clearly, Kerry has a legitimate point about making farms more productive. That's great and, where possible, people should do everything in their power to make sure it happens. However, to discourage the creation of new food sources in a region where children are starving to death by the thousands is utterly incomprehensible in its callousness. This is particularly true when there has been no discernable warming for over 17 years. Maybe if virtually every global warming prediction model for the last two decades hadn't failed so miserably, we'd have some sympathy for Mr. Kerry's icy position. Perhaps, if just one word of the following Al Gore speech had been correct, we'd more impressed with Kerry's warning. If, as Al Gore predicted in 2006, the global ice caps had vanished by 2014, we might be ready to tell suffering innocent children that a new farm "isn't the answer" to their starvation. As it is, our sympathies lie with children who are dying of hunger. If a new farm will do anything to relive their pain - anything at all - we should encourage its immediate construction.