This sounds very conspiracy-y. I'm sure there are metrics like consumption of certain items like food, medicine, etc. which is at a mostly consistent level accross subsections the human population. Like arthiris medication, foodstuffs, diapers etc.

It would take a very involved conspiracy to make these numbers fall in line with where they should be given a certain pop cap, and I'm not sure what would be the benefit.

Like all conspiracy theories, if it requires a coordination of large unrelated organizations over long timeframes, which seems impossible even over the table, its almost certainly fake.

Like you can fake census data, but not how many cans of beans does a US-headquartered supermarket chain sells.

There are a few particular problems with this, and that is you're thinking like a first worlder.

What we consider developing nations can quite often just go without these items. Economies in these countries can have rapid swings that cause massive changes in consumption. Shortages of medicines in one year can massively increase child deaths in the first year, where as the next 5 years don't have an issue with that.

With the last one, maybe there is a tik-tok trend that makes beans popular for a year, and then it dies out and half as many beans are consumed. This also isn't counting the average calorie consumption in a country. 10 cans of beans in the US might feed 20-30 people in another country when supplemented from locally grown items.

Shit's hard, yo.

You don't need a conspiracy, you just need the right incentives (aid) and the rules (freely available). People are going to independently figure out how to game the system.

Then there's also Occam: if you're a poor nation and you'll get more foreign aid if you inflate your population, you will inflate your population, full stop.