Over the past 11 years, the United Nations (UN) has been advancing an all-encompassing plan called Agenda 21. This plan is a forty-chapter manifesto allegedly defining the ills of the world and a host of collectivist solutions under the banner of sustainable development. Through Agenda 21, and a host of international treaties seeking to implement it, the UN is seeking to implement what they call global governance: a euphemism for world government.

There is a problem with Agenda 21. It does not work. It cannot work. Many of the problems allegedly cured with Agenda 21 - such as poverty, biodiversity, desertification, over population, and a host of others are made worse by this UN plan, not better. Other problems, like global warming, ozone depletion and others are not manmade problems, but natural phenomena made to appear to be manmade using pseudoscience in order to justify the alleged need for global governance.

Dozens of private organisations in the United States and around the world have committed themselves to finding better solutions to problems through an alternative program called Freedom 21. Freedom 21 centres on the well-proven principle that local people can find better solutions to local problems than is possible using the top-heavy central bureaucracy required by Agenda 21. The various principles and alternatives proposed by Freedom 21 are available for review at www.freedom21.org/alternative.

In contrast to the heavy regulatory mandate central to Agenda 21, Freedom 21 depends on a free market-driven economy. Free markets and minimum regulations allow for the creation of incentives that maximise the efficiencies of industrial production through creativity and entrepreneurship. The only laws needed are those to enforce the golden rule (often described as common law) that no person can conduct activities that cause harm to another person, or their property.

Freedom 21 calls for the establishment and the protection of all private property rights which, contrary to Agenda 21, allow the creation of needed capital for impoverished nations. In his compelling book The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto provides over-whelming evidence that an efficient system of legal private property rights provides the only proven way to eliminate poverty once corruption and overregulation is removed. Property rights are the primary reason why capitalism works in Western nations and does not within centrally controlled nations.

Contrary to the failed collectivist strategy of Agenda 21, Freedom 21 clearly demonstrates that the wealthier the people of a nation, the healthier and more satisfied they become. In turn, this shifts social dynamics in a way that causes lower population growth, better environmental protection and a more robust society.

While dozens of studies have shown that there is either no or only a slight positive correlation between increasing population and poverty, there is strong evidence that the higher the personal income of a family the fewer the children they will have. Increasing wealth is at least partially responsible for the plunging fertility rates of the world - from 5,0 children per fertile woman in 1950 to 2,8 by 2000. In the wealthier developed nations, it has dropped from 2,8 in 1950 to 1,9 in 2000, considerably below the replacement rate of 2,1. Population loss is now the number one problem in many developed nations.

Economist Dr. Jacqueline Kasun states, "that it is not population growth, nor the behaviour of private business that pose the big threat to environmental quality. It is the government, with its bottomless tax funds and its incentives to enlarge its activities no matter what the benefit-cost relationships." Because it depends on big government, Agenda 21 is destined to fail. Freedom 21 is the only means of attaining economic prosperity, population stability and environmental protection. Freedom 21 is a loose coalition of organisations and people who generally promote, among other things;

1. eliminating the politicalisation of science,
2. encouraging developed nations to open markets to developing nations,
3. linking free trade to demonstrated progress in reducing internal corruption and improving formal property rights,
4. discontinuing the support of coercive population control programs,
5. increasing environ-mental protection, controlling population growth and reducing poverty through the formalization of strong property rights for all people,
6. minimising government regulatory interference so as to increase individual wealth,
7. abandoning or extensively rewriting the Kyoto Protocol, Desertification Convention, Montreal Protocol and other treaties and agreements that use coercive compliance strategies that deny citizens of life, liberty and property, and
8. abandoning the effort to create global governance.

For more information see www.freedom21.org.