Hunger Plan 2026: How to create a food crisis

London is advising its citizens to stockpile canned goods and bottled water . Climate change and Moscow are to blame, of course. What's missing from the government brochure: This same government has slashed direct payments to its farmers by 98 percent, shut down the replacement program overnight, tightened inheritance taxes on farms, adopted a land-use plan that will take around 760,000 hectares out of agriculture – and it considers the model farm that has been producing yurts instead of wheat since 2001 to be the model for the future. Then came the drought. And now the harvest catastrophe is called "the weather."

Let's take it one step at a time, because the order is the key. In November 2015, 65 corporate representatives, former politicians, and foundation officials participated in a two-day simulation called Food Chain Reaction in Washington , D.C., funded by Cargill and Mars and organized by the WWF and the Center for American Progress. According to a Bloomberg report at the time, the scenario was : "The year is 2026." Floods, crop failures, refugee flows, unrest. The closing speech was given by John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff and founder of the organizing think tank. His manuscript, leaked by WikiLeaks , states that extreme weather becomes devastating when it coincides with "poor governance and bad political decisions." Remember that sentence; it's the exact instruction manual for what London subsequently implemented. You could call it coincidence. You could also ask why these gentlemen knew eleven years in advance which year the shelves would be empty.

Step one: Cut off the farmers' money

Since the post-war period, the British state has paid its farmers for producing food; the EUdSSR (European Union of the Soviet Union) turned this into an area-based payment. Under this system, an English farm received an average of £28,400 per year. After Brexit, the payment was renamed the "delinked payment" and gradually phased out, initially in seven annual increments until the end of 2027. Then Labour decided to accelerate the process: for 2026 and 2027, the first £30,000 will be reduced by 98 percent , and anything above that by 100 percent. The maximum payment per farm: £600 – the equivalent of a tank of diesel, as one farmer from Lincolnshire dryly calculated. The total fund fell from around £324 million to £20 million . In the House of Lords, this was presented as a reallocation "into nature," since robot weeders, after all, also contribute to food security.

Step two: Close the backup program overnight.

The green replacement program was called the Sustainable Farming Incentive and was intended to fill the gap left by direct payments. On the evening of March 11, 2025, it was closed to new applications without warning because the £1,06 billion cap had been reached. The responsible minister told the House of Commons: when the program is finished, it's finished. Just a few weeks earlier, the ministry had promised the sector minimal changes . Those who had just completed their applications were left with consultant bills and no contract; of over 100,000 farms in England, only 37,000 had a contract. The program didn't reopen until June 2026, with a £60 million window for small farms, three-quarters of which were gone within two weeks . In August, Prime Minister Andy Burnham then presented a £65 million drought relief package , which, according to the ministry, would be financed "by reprioritizing within the agricultural budget." In other words, money is being taken away from farmers to give them money, and this is being called aid.

Step three: Taxing the farm upon inheritance

In October 2024, Labour announced plans to abolish the decades-old inheritance tax exemption for farms. In November, thousands of farmers protested outside Parliament ; in January 2025, the four farmers' associations presented a petition with 270,000 signatures ; and in February, over a thousand tractors rolled into Westminster. The government claimed it would affect around 500 farms a year, while the landowners' association estimated that 70,000 farms above the threshold would be impacted. The concession: the threshold was raised from £1 million to £2,5 million. Since April 6, 2026, the full exemption only applies up to this amount; anything above that is effectively taxed at 20 percent . Anyone who thinks £2,5 million is a lot of money has never bought a combine harvester: a medium-sized family farm is a millionaire on paper but bankrupt in practice. The tax isn't paid directly; it's ceded, hectare by hectare. This is precisely the mechanism by which land is transferred from families to funds without ever having to utter the word "expropriation".

Step four: Repurpose the entire area

In parallel, the government presented its land-use framework. The consultation projected that by 2050, around 760,000 hectares, or 9 percent of England's agricultural land, should be completely taken out of agricultural use, with a further 5 percent designated for "limited food production." The final version, adopted in March 2026 , assures that the focus is primarily on "multifunctionality," not set-aside. The figures themselves remain unchanged. The driving force behind this is an international commitment: Boris Johnson pledged in 2020 to set aside 30 percent of the country's land for nature by 2030. This was signed at the UN Biodiversity Summit in 2022, and Defra delivered the implementation plan in July 2026. According to its own criteria, 2,8 percent is currently considered effectively protected, so the remaining 27 percent must come from somewhere, and in a country where the majority of the land is agricultural, there is only one place to find it.

The movement's flagship project, the Knepp estate in West Sussex, which the government cited as a model in its 25-year environmental plan , demonstrates what this looks like. 1400 hectares, dairy farming and arable farming until 2001 , now offer safari tours in off-road vehicles, yurts, tree houses, and shepherd's huts for paying city dwellers, generating £800,000 in annual revenue, plus state conservation subsidies. The estate owner has written a bestseller about it, and the film adaptation was the most successful British documentary of 2024. A farm that no longer produces a single calorie on 1400 hectares is thus the official success story of British agriculture. A country whose self-sufficiency rate has fallen from over 80 percent to 65 percent since the 1980s is therefore officially deciding on even less production and paying these model students to lead by example.

Then the weather came

Yes, the drought is real. July was the driest since records began , a drought was declared for over half of England at the end of July , the harvest is the worst since 1984 , and on top of that, bluetongue disease is raging in livestock – the disease for which mass graves are being dug elsewhere . But droughts have always existed; Burnham himself calls it the third in five years . What didn't exist before is a farming community without any reserves. The president of the National Farmers' Union (NFU) puts it himself : England's farmers are "without the breathing room that direct payments once provided," and many no longer have the money to even sow in the autumn. No money for seeds means no harvest in 2027, no matter how much rain there is. Politicians have removed the buffer, the weather has struck, and the headlines only mention the latter. This is exactly what Podesta described in 2015, only he meant it as a warning, not a solution.

And who benefits from an empty plate?

Since November 13, 2025, genome-edited plants have been permitted in England to be cultivated and sold via an expedited approval process, explicitly justified by the need for food security and drought resistance. The millions in subsidies freed up are being channeled into a 200-million-euro innovation program for field robots and data-driven agriculture—precisely the kind of surveillance technology we've already described in terms of thermal imaging drones, digital chips, and government vaccination teams on our pastures . First, deplete reserves, then declare a state of emergency, then sell the solution that was already in the drawer—we've seen this business model dissected in " Dr. Frankenstein Has Now Dissected a Business Model." And England is merely the model student: The Netherlands spent 1,81 billion euros to close 723 livestock farms, achieving a result of eight percent less nitrogen surplus. Even these figures had to be wrested from the minister by a court. In June, a 20 billion euro package followed , with a cap of 2,6 cows per hectare. The backstory, involving tractor blockades and police shootings, is described in " Protests in the Netherlands: Police shoot at unarmed farmers ." The German Farmers' Association reports a 7 percent drop in grain , a 20 percent drop in rapeseed, and farms that cannot finance the next sowing without bridging loans, while fuel becomes a luxury item, as described in "Diesel crisis: Why the world harvest will die at the pump in 2026" and "Hunger by Design ." That all this is happening right on schedule with Agenda 2030 and fits seamlessly into the second phase of the Great Reset is, of course, also just a matter of chance.

Whether someone in a back room put "famine" on the agenda cannot be proven, nor does it need to be. It's enough that every single step was decided upon, documented, and implemented despite warnings. Farmers' support was taken away, they were helped as they fell, and the bill was paid out of their own pockets. A country's bread is taken away, planned in a consultation, signed off on in parliament, and this is called "resilience." And when the tins in the cellar are empty, they'll tell you that you simply hadn't stockpiled enough!