Context: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned that if the war with Iran drags on for more than 40 days and fertilizer prices remain high, it could affect crop yields as early as 2026. The United Nations has also stated that the conflict in the Middle East has significantly disrupted the global food supply. Some 70,000 tons of food are stuck in transport, have become more expensive, or being delivered via alternative routes — enough to feed four million people for a month.
On April 6, 2026, economic analyst Georgy Grits appeared on the CTV talk show Po sushchestvu and said that the West allegedly wants to solve the food problem by radically reducing the world’s population.
“The Rockefeller Foundation is one example of such a fund. By the way, The Rockefeller Foundation funds, by 80%, this so-called World Health Fund and the FAO. Even Trump withdrew from there because of this. Here’s the data. I think it’s called “Reset the Table.” I believe that report was from 2022 or 2023, and it said that food… In other words, the food crisis can be solved in several ways. One way is to follow Belarus’s example and increase productivity, efficiency, and so on. But it turns out that another way is possible: reducing the number of consumers, i.e., the population. And they suggest this, so to speak, as a concept: natural food would be available only by prescription from a doctor, to be replaced with artificial food.”
Essentially, the broadcast claimed that the Rockefeller Foundation wants to limit people’s access to natural foods and transition the population to artificial nutrition.
However, this description does not align with either the Foundation’s role or the contents of the report. While the Rockefeller Foundation is indeed a donor to the World Health Organization (WHO), its contribution to WHO funding amounts to only 0.02%, far less than the 80% announced. Contrary to what was said on air, the Foundation has nothing to do with the FAO. The organization is funded by governments and international bodies, and the Foundation has only sponsored individual projects.
The “Reset the Table” report is a real document. However, its scope is not global; it focuses on the problems of the U.S. food system. The authors suggest revamping it because poor nutrition worsens Americans’ health and increases healthcare costs. Meanwhile, healthy food remains out of reach for many due to their income level. This report criticizes previous approaches to agricultural intensification. While these approaches did feed more people, they primarily made “empty calories” cheap. Instead, the proposal is to redirect government subsidies from cereal crop production to healthier foods.
This is the context in which the idea of prescribing certain foods appears. The idea is not to limit access to natural foods, but rather to make fruits and vegetables more accessible to the poor and chronically ill. It is assumed that a doctor can prescribe such products, and that their cost would be covered by health insurance. Similar practices are already in place in Pennsylvania. For example, people with diabetes receive a doctor’s prescription for several days’ worth of free healthy food.
The report makes no mention of reducing the population or putting people on an artificial food supply. Such interpretations are more characteristic of conspiracy theories. In these interpretations, the reform of the food system is presented as an attempt to force people to eat modified foods while leaving natural foods for a select few.
Georgy Grits went on to reference another study.
“I thought it was a worthless fake. But just last week, I saw a report by, I guess, the Melbourne Institute or University. <...> The scientists in the report say that the natural population size that can be fed with natural food is 2.5 billion people They don’t say what to do with the other 6 billion people. Do you see how inhuman and Goebbels-like this ideology is?”
In this case, the economic analyst also misrepresented the study’s findings. It was not about the University of Melbourne, but about research conducted by another Australian university, Flinders University. The researchers indeed estimated how many people the Earth could support. According to their calculations, the optimal population size is approximately 2.5 billion, while the maximum theoretical limit is around 12 billion. However, the authors did not advocate reducing the population to the optimal level nor suggest what to do with the excess population. They came to a different conclusion: With a more rational use of resources, humanity could feed the current world population and more.
Thus, the CTV expert combined two sources — an American report on food system reform and an Australian study on resource limits — into one conspiracy theory. He concluded that Western elites supposedly wanted to reduce the Earth’s population and transition people to artificial food. However, neither the Rockefeller Foundation nor the scientists mentioned by the commentator have proposed these ideas.
