Home-grown food ‘ban’ claim has lost the garden plot

There are claims a study about the carbon footprint of urban farming is part of a “globalist” plot to ban people from growing their own fruit and veggies.

By William Summers
Australian Associated Press
March 12, 2024

Excerpt:

A misinformation-spreading website says the research was funded by the World Economic Forum (WEF), an international non-governmental body regularly targeted by conspiracy theorists.

This is false. The study is real, but claims linking it to a WEF plot are baseless and the research makes no suggestion home-grown produce should be banned.

One of the study’s authors told AAP FactCheck they have no links to the WEF and the organisation did not fund their research.

The claim was made in a March 1 article by Slay News, a “pro-free speech” website with a history of publishing deceptive clickbait stories – see here, here, here and here.

The article has been shared widely on social media, including here, here and here.

“The World Economic Forum (WEF) is calling on governments to ban the general public from growing their own food at home by arguing that they are causing ‘climate change’,” the article states.

It claims the WEF’s alleged push to outlaw home-grown produce is based on research by “WEF-funded scientists at the University of Michigan … published in the journal Nature Cities“.

The study is a January 2024 paper titled ‘Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture’.

Its purpose was to compare the environmental performance of 73 European and US urban agriculture sites against conventional non-urban farms.

The urban sites included community gardens, city farms and individual plots.

Overall, the carbon footprint of food from all types of urban sites was about six times greater than conventional agriculture sites, the researchers concluded.

Read the complete article here.