The World Economic Forum has not demanded a ban on homegrown food

^{By David Campbell}

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has rejected social media claims that it is demanding an end to home vegetable gardens off the back of a study it purportedly funded.

Facebook posts attribute the claim to an article published by Slay News, a website that describes itself as an “independent media outlet” and which has a history of spreading misinformation.

The article, which carries the headline “WEF Demands Ban on Home-Grown Food to Stop ‘Global Warming’,” claims that research conducted by WEF-funded scientists has “discovered that the ‘carbon footprint’ of home-grown food is ‘destroying the planet’”.

“As a result, the WEF and other globalist climate zealots are now demanding that governments intervene and ban individuals from growing their own food”, it says.

But a spokesperson for the WEF has rejected the claims as baseless, telling RMIT Lookout in an email that the organisation “has never made such a statement and does not endorse any policy that advocates banning homegrown food”.

The WEF in fact appears to be supportive of homegrown food, featuring many articles promoting the benefits of urban farming on its website.

The false claims followed a study published in the journal Nature Cities in January 2024 whose findings and authors have been misrepresented.

The study analysed the carbon footprints of 73 urban agriculture (UA) sites in five countries. It then calculated the climate change impacts per serving of produce and compared the results to those for conventional agriculture products.

“Results reveal that the carbon footprint of food from UA is six times greater than conventional agriculture,” the study found, while highlighting variations across particular crops and types of individual and communal gardens or farms.

The authors did not find homegrown food was “destroying the planet”, as claimed in the article, nor did they propose banning urban agriculture. Instead, they recommended improvements to urban farming practices on the basis of 17 sites deemed to be “climate friendly”.

The study found that certain crops and sites, including 25 per cent of individually managed gardens, outperformed conventional agriculture, and that this suggested people could reduce the climate impacts of urban agriculture by, for example, cultivating crops that were typically greenhouse-grown or air-freighted.

University of Michigan researcher and study co-author Jason Hawes told RMIT Lookout the study was “not paid for or in any way affiliated with the World Economic Forum”. The WEF spokesperson also confirmed the organisation had “not been involved in this study”.

Indeed, the research paper makes no reference to the WEF but says the study was based on the “FEW-meter project”, an international project that aimed to develop a comprehensive system to measure existing urban agriculture practices. The project was funded by several major research institutes, including the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the French National Research Agency.

Other fact checkers have also found claims about the supposed food ban to be false.

This is not the first time the WEF has been a target of misinformation. RMIT’s fact-checking team has previously debunked false claims that the WEF was meddling in elections, tracking people with clothing tags and hatching plans to kill pets.

Such schemes are often ascribed to the “Great Reset”, a grand conspiracy in which nefarious globalist elites are supposedly working to bring about a socialist world government. Although the WEF has used this phrase while calling for a more equitable approach to capitalism, the lack of specific detail has allowed conspiracy theories to flourish.