# Global elites are deliberately engineering food shortages to control or depopulate the public **Verdict: Contradicted.** The scattered events the theory strings together, a cluster of ordinary food-plant fires, Dutch nitrogen rules, Sri Lanka's fertilizer ban, billionaire farmland purchases, and pandemic-and-war price spikes, each have documented, publicly debated explanations. Fact-checkers at the AP, Reuters, FactCheck.org, and PolitiFact found no evidence they are a coordinated plot to starve or control anyone. Category: Secret Societies & Power · Era: 2020s · First circulated: 2020 · Believed by: Amplified widely on social media during the 2021–2023 food-price spikes URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/deliberate-food-shortage ## Summary The claim that a network of global elites, usually framed as the World Economic Forum, the 'Great Reset,' billionaires, or 'globalists,' is deliberately manufacturing food scarcity through factory fires, fertilizer bans, livestock culls, and farmland buy-ups, in order to control or depopulate ordinary people. Real supply shocks and real, contested farm policy sit underneath the story; the coordinated-plot reading laid over them does not survive contact with the evidence. ## The claim That recent food-price spikes and supply disruptions are not the result of a pandemic, a war, weather, and ordinary industrial accidents, but a covert, coordinated campaign by powerful elites to engineer famine, using suspicious fires at food-processing plants, government restrictions on fertilizer and nitrogen, livestock culls, and large-scale farmland acquisition as deliberate tools to starve the public into dependence or reduce the global population. ## Origin and timeline - 2020-06: The World Economic Forum launches 'The Great Reset,' a set of nonbinding proposals for rebuilding economies after COVID-19. Online, the phrase is quickly reframed as a master plan by global elites to seize control of daily life, including what people eat. - 2020–2021: Pandemic lockdowns snarl supply chains and push up grocery prices worldwide, giving early 'planned famine' and 'they want you to own nothing' narratives a real-world hook. - 2021-04: Sri Lanka's government abruptly bans imports of chemical fertilizer and pesticides, aiming to become the first fully organic nation. Harvests fall sharply and the policy is largely reversed by November 2021. - 2022-02: Russia invades Ukraine, two of the world's largest grain and fertilizer exporters. The FAO Food Price Index hits a record high in March 2022 as grain, energy, and fertilizer markets are disrupted. - 2022-04: A run of fires at U.S. food-processing plants goes viral as alleged proof of sabotage. FactCheck.org, the AP, Reuters, and PolitiFact examine the claim and find the fires ordinary in number and unconnected. - 2022-06-10: The Dutch government publishes steep nitrogen-reduction targets that would force many livestock farms to shrink or close. Farmer protests erupt, and posts recast the policy as a deliberate scheme to end farming and starve the public. - 2022: Sri Lanka slides into a full economic and political crisis. The fertilizer ban, layered on top of a foreign-currency collapse, is folded into the theory as evidence of an engineered global famine. - 2022–2023: Reports that Bill Gates is the largest individual owner of U.S. farmland resurface as claims that billionaires are buying up land to control the food supply. - 2023–2024: The narrative persists as a recurring, ever-growing list of plant fires and 'incidents,' shared as a running tally that fact-checkers repeatedly show is padded with unrelated or routine events. ## The evidence, claim by claim - Claim: A wave of fires at food-processing plants in 2022 proves someone is destroying the food supply on purpose. Evidence: The National Fire Protection Association said there were roughly 20 fires at U.S. food-processing facilities in the first four months of 2022, calling that not extreme and nothing out of the ordinary; the country averaged more than 5,000 fires a year at manufacturing and processing facilities between 2015 and 2019. Fire officials attributed the individual blazes to accidents, and the USDA told Reuters that claims the fires were arson were false and that there was no food shortage or disruption to the food supply. - Claim: The Netherlands is forcibly closing farms and culling livestock to engineer famine. Evidence: The Dutch nitrogen plan is a publicly debated environmental policy, not a covert one. It followed a 2019 Dutch court ruling, itself citing a 2018 EU Court of Justice judgment, that the country's rules on nitrogen pollution from intensive livestock breached European law. The government's targets, buy-out offers, and timelines were published, contested in parliament and the courts, and fought over in open elections; the dispute is about ecology, land use, and fairness to farmers, not a plan to starve the public. - Claim: Sri Lanka's collapse shows elites forcing organic farming to trigger mass starvation. Evidence: Sri Lanka's 2021 fertilizer ban was a decision by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's own government, driven partly by a foreign-currency crisis that made imports unaffordable and partly by health claims about agrochemicals. Economists widely judge it a self-inflicted national policy failure, compounded by a wider debt and currency collapse, and it was reversed within months. It is a cautionary tale about abrupt top-down agriculture policy, not evidence of a coordinated global plot. - Claim: Bill Gates is buying up American farmland to seize control of the food supply. Evidence: Gates is reportedly the largest individual owner of U.S. farmland, but 'largest individual' is not 'controlling share.' His holdings, around 240,000 to 270,000 acres, are roughly 0.03 percent of the roughly 895 million acres of U.S. farmland, a fraction Gates himself put at less than one four-thousandth. Owning a tiny sliver more than any other single person does not confer control over what a nation of farmers grows. - Claim: The 'Great Reset' is a blueprint to ration food, impose scarcity, and reduce the population. Evidence: The WEF's Great Reset is a set of nonbinding discussion papers with no enforcement power, no world government behind it, and no authority over any country's food system. Fact-checkers including Full Fact and PolitiFact traced the 'they will restrict what you eat' and 'depopulation' claims to fabricated quotes and misreadings; a widely shared 'depopulation' passage does not appear in the Great Reset book at all. ## Why people believe it - The shocks were real and arrived together. Empty shelves, record grocery bills, a pandemic, and a war landed in the same short window, and a mind under stress reaches naturally for a single agent behind a run of bad events rather than a tangle of unrelated causes. - Some of the underlying grievances are genuine. Dutch farmers really were told to shrink or sell; Sri Lankan farmers really were left without fertilizer. Real, visible policy pain gives the plot a place to attach itself, even when the leap to intent is unsupported. - A 'globalist elite' offers a satisfying villain: a named, morally clear culprit for diffuse economic pain that is otherwise no one's fault in particular and everyone's problem at once. - Distrust of Davos, the WEF, and billionaires is widespread and not baseless; opaque gatherings of the powerful invite suspicion, which the theory converts into certainty. - The evidence is packaged to look overwhelming. A long, screenshot-friendly list of fires and 'incidents' feels like proof by accumulation, even when nearly every item on it is ordinary or unrelated. ## Open questions - How far should governments restructure agriculture for climate and environmental goals, and who should bear the cost, remains a genuine, unresolved policy fight. The Dutch nitrogen dispute is a real argument about ecology versus livelihoods; that it is real does not make it a starvation plot, but the grievance driving the protests is not imaginary. - Concentration in the food system, of farmland, seeds, processing, and grain trading, is a legitimate subject of antitrust and food-security debate. Worrying about who owns and controls the food supply is reasonable; the answer that a single cabal is engineering famine is not what the ownership data shows. - The Sri Lanka episode is a real cautionary lesson about the harm abrupt, top-down agricultural mandates can do. The open question is about technocratic overreach and policy humility, not about a secret coordinated campaign to depopulate the planet. - The pandemic and the war exposed how fragile and just-in-time global food supply chains have become. That fragility is real and worth fixing; it is the opposite of a controlled, centrally directed scarcity, which is what the theory alleges. ## Sources - Unfounded Claims About Frequency and Causes of Food Plant Fires, FactCheck.org (2022): https://www.factcheck.org/2022/05/unfounded-claims-about-frequency-and-causes-of-food-plant-fires/ - FACT FOCUS: Food plant fires fuel conspiracy theory, Associated Press (via The Seattle Times) (2022): https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation/fact-focus-food-plant-fires-fuel-conspiracy-theory/ - No, food-plant fires aren't attempt to create food shortages, PolitiFact (2022): https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/apr/26/facebook-posts/no-food-plant-fires-arent-attempt-create-food-shor/ - This 95-item list doesn't prove there are ongoing plans to create food shortages, PolitiFact (2022): https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jun/15/facebook-posts/95-item-list-doesnt-prove-there-are-ongoing-plans-/ - Does Bill Gates Own the Majority of US Farmland?, Snopes (2023): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bill-gates-own-farmland/ - The Great Reset: What is it?, Full Fact (2020): https://fullfact.org/online/great-reset-conspiracy-theory/ - “The Great Reset” Conspiracy Flourishes Amid Continued Pandemic, Anti-Defamation League (2020): https://www.adl.org/resources/article/great-reset-conspiracy-flourishes-amid-continued-pandemic - Dutch Farmer Protests Show How Messy the Climate Transition Will Be, Time (2022): https://time.com/6201951/dutch-farmers-protests-climate-action/ - Sri Lanka's Organic Farming Experiment Went Catastrophically Wrong, Foreign Policy (2022): https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05/sri-lanka-organic-farming-crisis/ - Ukraine war squeezes food supplies, drives up prices, threatens vulnerable nations, UN News (2022): https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/05/1118172 Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/deliberate-food-shortage