What was claimed
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is demanding a global ban on homegrown food to meet Net-Zero targets.
Our verdict
False. The WEF has not called for any such ban.
No, the World Economic Forum hasn’t called for a ban on homegrown food
Posts circulating on social media claim that the World Economic Forum (WEF) wants to ban people from growing food at home in order to lower emissions. But the organisation has never made such a statement.
Several of the posts include a link or screenshot of an article published by the website Slay News, which has previously been scrutinised by other fact checking organisations. The article is headlined: “WEF Demands Global Ban on Homegrown Food to Meet ‘Net Zero’”.
The Slay News article claims “the WEF and other globalist climate zealots are now demanding that governments intervene and ban individuals from growing their own food in order to ‘save the planet’ from ‘global warming’”.
It also cites a research paper “conducted by WEF-scientists at the University of Michigan” and published in the journal Nature Cities, which it claims suggested “garden-to-table produce causes a far greater carbon footprint than conventional agricultural practices”.
This study is real and was widely reported on in the press for its findings, which suggested food from urban agriculture in the US and Europe has a carbon footprint six times greater than that of food produced by conventional, commercial agriculture. But both the WEF and a co-author of the study have confirmed it is not linked to or funded by the WEF. The research paper also makes no suggestion that home-grown produce should be banned.
A spokesperson for the WEF told Full Fact the organisation “has never made such a statement and does not endorse any policy that advocates banning homegrown food”.
The spokesperson said the University of Michigan study “certainly provides valuable insights into the climate impacts of urban agriculture”, but added that the WEF had not been involved in this study, and did not fund it.
The study’s co-author Jason Hawes also told AAP FactCheck in March 2024 that the study "received no support from the World Economic Forum, and we (the authors) have no connections to the WEF".
He added: “Furthermore, we have no interest in banning urban food growing - many of us are gardeners ourselves and are simply aiming to promote low-carbon methods of urban agriculture.”
The WEF has been the subject of a lot of misinformation we’ve written about before, including the false claim that the organisation is engineering the climate.
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 World Economic Forum has not called for a ban on homegrown food.