What was claimed
Thirteen nations have abolished farming to save the planet.
Our verdict
There is no evidence to support this claim. The article making the claim links to a press release which does not mention abolishing farming.
The US, Germany and 11 other nations haven’t abolished farming to tackle climate change
17 August 2023
A number of posts on Facebook and Twitter claim that 13 nations have agreed to abolish farming in order to tackle climate change.
The posts take the form of a screenshot of what appears to be an Australian Sky News presenter, standing in front of a headline from a paper called The European Union Times, which claims: “13 nations agree to abolish farming in order to ‘save the planet’”.
But there is no evidence to support the claim that 13 countries have committed to “abolish farming”.
The European Union Times (a publication described as sharing “conspiracy-pseudoscience” by Media Bias/Fact Check, an independent website that rates the bias, factual accuracy, and credibility of media sources) article bases this claim on a May press release published by the Global Methane Hub, which announces news that “agriculture and environment ministers and ambassadors from 13 countries [...] have issued a commitment to reduce methane emissions in agriculture”.
The press release does not promote abolishing or banning farming. The 13 countries who committed to reducing emissions are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Chile, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Germany, Panama, Peru, Spain, the US, and Uruguay.
Full Fact could find no evidence that any of these nations had committed to abolishing farming.
It is not clear if the article ever appeared on Sky News, or if the screenshot has been edited. We were unable to find a clip of it being discussed, or any online reports on this subject from Sky News Australia. We contacted Sky News Australia to confirm whether the screenshot is genuine, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Misleading images and videos are some of the most common kinds of misinformation we see online, but they can sometimes be hard to spot. It’s always worth checking if social media images and videos show what the post says they do before you share them—we have written a guide on how to do so here and here.
Full Fact has contacted The European Union Times for comment.
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Image courtesy of Richard Bell |
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the press release the claim is based on does not make any mention of the countries abolishing farming.