The claim that the United Nations is attempting to control people via Agenda 2030 is “just a false attempt to paint sensible plans for sustainable development as some sort of communist plan, which it is not,” UN spokeswoman Heidi Beirich told AFP Fact Check in 2020. 

Mainstreamers have considered Beirich to be a superstar debunker since she penned her 2014 ad hominem attack, Agenda 21: The UN, Sustainability and Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Agenda 21 is the precursor to Agenda 2030, which all 193 UN member states have signed.

The John Birch Society is the principal villain in her exposé. Beirich wrote, “Agenda 21 has been transformed in much of the American public mind into a secret plot to impose a totalitarian world government, a nefarious effort to crush freedom in the name of environmentalism.” She blamed Birchers for the transformation; Birchers proudly take credit.

Beirich’s report reads with all the maturity of a playground retort: Agenda 21 is “a feel-good guide that cannot force anyone, anywhere to do anything at all.” The faceless, unelected bureaucrats who crafted it and its sequel simply want to make the world a better place, she says. 

Historical precedent belies her claims. Governments unfailingly tend toward tyranny, not beneficence. Controlling people by controlling resources is the oldest trick in the dictator’s book.

Siege warfare and blockades are the most primitive examples. Another age-old military tactic is scorched earth, when armies obliterate crops and irrigation systems to starve entire populations into submission.

Conquerors never pretend that their goal for the defeated is freedom; on the contrary, acquisition of territory, enslavement of populations, and accumulation of wealth are their aims. However, wars can be costly, and as Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote in his time-honored treatise The Art of War, the “supreme” method is “to subdue the enemy without fighting.” So as time went on, techniques of domination became increasingly shrewd and sinister.

History abounds with examples, such as England’s conquest of Ireland. It began with King Henry VIII’s 1534 Act of Supremacy, in which he declared himself sovereign over Ireland by the stroke of a pen. The next hundred years witnessed legalized theft of Irish plantations and led to Oliver Cromwell’s military conquest of the Emerald Isle in 1652. The use of famine and land dispossession were central to Cromwell’s campaign.

Next came the Popery Acts of 1704 and 1709, when Parliament restricted Catholics’ property ownership, using religion as a cover for more massive theft of real estate and turning Ireland into a country of absentee English landowners and Irish tenant farmers. The situation spelled doom for the nation when blight hit the potato crops in 1845 and 1846, and massive famine ensued. Landowners didn’t live there, so they cared little for the plight of the starving.

However, people starved because of government policies, not potato blight. First, the Crown restricted grain imports to Ireland and enforced Irish food exports to Britain, and then it required Irishmen who received government aid to give up their farms. According to Griffith’s Valuation, a land survey completed in 1868, only three percent of Irish farmers were landowners, and less than two percent of landowners owned more than one-third of farm acreage. Roughly a quarter of Ireland’s population fled this tyranny — many immigrating to the United States.

Blame game: Heidi Beirich, former Intelligence Project Director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, blamed John Birch Society members for giving Agenda 21 a bad name. (AP Images)

Federal Copycats

Would they cringe today knowing how much of their adopted country is owned by the federal government, foreign entities, and absentee landlords? We certainly should, considering how vulnerable our food supplies are on this account. The statistics are grim:

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the federal government currently manages about 28 percent of the total land area in the country, while only 20 percent of agricultural acreage is owned and operated by individuals and private partnerships, who labor under such grueling government regulations that they have many parallels with tenant farmers of old.

Additionally, though the amount of farmland has held relatively steady during the past century, the number of farms has plummeted from a high of nearly seven million in the 1940s to two million today, while the average farm size increased nearly three-fold. Three percent of domestic farms now make up 47 percent of the value of production.

As for infrastructure, the University of Illinois researched the U.S. food supply chain in 2019 to find that nine counties in the United States are “most central to the overall structure of the food supply network.” A disruption in any of them could affect the entire country. Moreover, poverty advocacy organization Oxfam reports that only 10 companies — Associated British Foods, Coca-Cola, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Unilever — control almost every large food and beverage brand in the world.

Has this happened by accident, or could the U.S. government be repeating history? A brief glance at the past 250 years makes the answer to that question painfully apparent.

History Repeats

In America’s Colonial days, more than 95 percent of the population earned a living by farming, historians estimate. Moreover, people of that day knew Ireland’s sad story of British oppression. The Crown had pulled the same stunts in the 17th and 18th centuries in its takeover of India, largely driven by the desire to establish a monopoly in the opium trade. With government endorsement, the British East India Company coerced local farmers to grow poppies instead of sustenance crops, often through forced labor and debt bondage. Famine and widespread poverty resulted, and India fell to British rule.

America boasted plentiful natural resources, and her pioneers did not want to become another statistic of British colonial rule. She won her independence in 1784, and for more than half a century, her farmers enjoyed the fruits of their labor, relatively free of federal interference. The executive branch operated only five Cabinet departments and nine major agencies until 1849. Enter the Department of the Interior, established not merely to manage federal lands — which the General Land Office had been doing since 1812 — but also to manage resources on federal lands: forests, minerals, waterways, etc.

Then, during the first Republican administration, the floodgates opened. President Abraham Lincoln spearheaded corporate welfare by signing into law legislation creating the USDA in 1862. The fledgling agency was authorized to advance “agriculture, rural development, aquaculture and human nutrition in the most general and comprehensive sense of those terms.” As if to cover all bases, during the same year, Lincoln also signed into law the Morrill Land Grant College Act (which marked the first federal foray into higher education and would soon provide an army of intellectuals to justify government encroachment), the Homestead Act (ostensibly to promote westward pioneer expansion, but exploited by wealthy investors to acquire vast tracts of land), and the Second Confiscation Act (which built upon the First Confiscation Act, passed in 1861, to seize land and property from Confederates).  

These measures might not seem outlandish to us today, but imagine how dictatorial they appeared to countrymen who until then had been relatively unfettered by federal usurpations. It is supremely ironic that the destructive legislation of 1862, passed during a war fought supposedly to free the enslaved, planted the seeds of government oppression of the citizens of the United States, just as her big sister had done to Ireland a century before.

Indeed, the last half of the 19th century saw the birth of 19 major agencies, and 25 more were added in the 20th century prior to the catastrophic administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). Each bureau unconstitutionally expanded government overreach, robbing states of their sovereignty and establishing federal control of currency, education, commerce, transportation, industry, labor, and many other areas, but none more than land and agriculture.

For example, the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 established national forests to prevent private development and manipulate water resources. The Interstate Commerce Commission, founded in 1887 supposedly to protect the little guy, resulted in artificially high transportation costs that favored railroad monopolies and large enterprises. The 1916 Federal Farm Loan Act effectively created debt bondage for farmers in the years leading up to the government-induced Great Depression, when bankruptcies and foreclosures caused widespread loss of private property. 

Likewise, the 1929 Agricultural Marketing Act authorized the government to buy and store 257 million bushels of wheat. Supposedly, farmers were overproducing and flooding the post-World War I domestic market, causing grain prices to plummet. (The real reason was — you guessed it — government interference. All industries across the nation were losing profits because public buying power was eroded by government control of the money supply and centralized bank credit expansion brought on in 1913 by the new Federal Reserve System.) Officials waited until the winter of 1931-1932 to dump the stored wheat on the market, driving prices to their lowest in history and bankrupting those “overproducing” farmers in the middle of the Great Depression.

The Old Deal

That’s when FDR arrived on the scene with his New Deal. But it wasn’t “new”; FDR took all his cues from the age-old tyrants’ playbook. The only difference was that his series of programs and regulations put federal conquest of the states into overdrive. In the span of just five years he launched more than 100 distinct agencies and initiatives, and he opened the door wide for international hucksters to wreak havoc on our nation.

His Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 targeted farmers and food. It created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which immediately became the nest of the “Ware Cell,” named for Harold Ware, a Communist Party member and one of many such adherents recruited for New Deal agencies. 

Their story is told in Dan Van Gorder’s 1966 book Ill Fares the Land: The Famine Planned for America. Ware Cell members had been trained to conduct espionage and influence U.S. policy regarding labor and agriculture. Ware himself had helped Vladimir Lenin set up forced farm collectives in the Soviet Union following the Russian famine of 1921. (That catastrophe came about not by an act of God but because the Bolshevik Revolution destroyed agricultural production and infrastructure while imposing grain requisitions for the military and elites. Americans — banker Jacob Schiff and mining magnate William Boyce Thompson — financed this concocted famine, as detailed in James Perloff’s 1988 book The Shadows of Power. Historians estimate as many as five million perished.)

Another well-known Ware Cell member was Alger Hiss, who would later serve as the secretary-general of the U.S. delegation at the 1945 founding of the United Nations in San Francisco. Five years later America learned that he was a communist spy; he was convicted on two counts of perjury for denying espionage and passing government documents to Soviet officials.

Ware and Hiss were among the bureaucrats in 1929 who blamed American farmers for low agricultural prices following the First World War. Their AAA answer in 1933 was to repeat the swindle of the Agricultural Marketing Act, buying up all the so-called surplus, and paying farmers to halt production. 

The truth was that domestic demand far outpaced supply, as Van Gorder documents. To fulfill that demand, officials arranged for low-cost foreign imports to replace the missing domestic product. Roosevelt got around protective tariffs, which were in place at the time, by signing the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, which gave the president authority to negotiate bilateral trade agreements and lower tariffs without congressional approval. Thus began America’s dependence on imports and her domestic vulnerability to adverse weather conditions, as borne out in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. 

In 1936, the U.S. Supreme Court nearly stopped this trajectory in its tracks. SCOTUS struck down key parts of the AAA as unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the victory was short-lived, because in 1938 Congress passed a new and worse AAA, introducing mandatory crop quotas and expanded subsidies to pay farmers to reduce production.

Ohio farmer Roscoe Filburn found himself in the crosshairs when he planted roughly double his quota of wheat: 23 acres instead of 11. The government fined him, so Filburn sued, arguing that the extra wheat was not for sale but for personal use on his farm. SCOTUS ruled unanimously against him, claiming authority under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. (By the time the ruling was handed down in 1942, Roosevelt had packed the court with New Deal liberals.) They said that by growing his own wheat, Filburn reduced the amount he needed to purchase, thereby affecting interstate commerce.

The ruling meant government could suddenly regulate self-sufficiency on any farm. Wickard v. Filburn is considered a landmark case that greatly cemented federal power over agriculture, for, as Justice Robert H. Jackson arrogantly wrote in the ruling, “It is hardly lack of due process for the government to regulate that which it subsidizes.”

The Food Regime: Nestle Corporation is one of only 10 companies that Oxfam identifies as controlling almost every large food and beverage brand in the world. (AP Images)

Heads on the Hydra

Since then, federal control of agriculture has only expanded, pushing global rather than national interests. In 1949, four years after the United States joined the United Nations, President Harry Truman initiated the International Wheat Agreement, predecessor to the modern International Grains Council, a government cartel that regulates the production, price, and distribution of wheat among its member nations. Today, it’s headquartered in London, the home of history’s most proficient experts in land-grabbing tactics.

Next, President Dwight Eisenhower’s USDA began “Food for Peace” in 1954, a foreign aid program that shipped our sustenance even to nations hostile to the United States. Through the U.S. Agency for International Development, founded in 1961, foreign aid took on a feed-the-world focus that now amounts to billions of U.S. tax dollars every year.

Meanwhile, Eisenhower’s “Wheat Police” were terrorizing American farmers. They could invade any farm in the nation and conduct warrantless searches to determine compliance with quotas and acreage allotments. Violators were fined and/or imprisoned without trial. Within the first year, the USDA fined 14,000 farmers more than $8.5 million (equivalent to more than $94 million in 2025). Time magazine of March 9, 1959, told the story of Michigan farmer Stanley Yankus, fined $4,562 (nearly $50,000 in 2025 dollars) for raising wheat to feed his chickens. He told the House Agriculture Committee, “I am not fighting for the right to grow wheat. I am fighting for the right to own property. If I am forbidden the use of my land, then I do not own it.”

The Wheat Police reign of terror ended due to public outcry such as his, but even then the USDA relaxed restrictions only enough to allow small farmers to grow up to 30 acres of wheat for their own use. Meanwhile, SCOTUS continually refused to hear cases challenging the constitutionality of USDA programs.

Recent decades have witnessed further federal expansion. The late 1950s saw the Soil Bank paying farmers to leave their fields fallow as Congress hypocritically dammed the Colorado River to cultivate high, arid land in northern Arizona and southern Utah never before farmed. Commodity price fixing in the 1960s and 1970s wreaked havoc on agricultural economy and food prices, as the USDA enforced unionism on American farmers and ranchers, further undermining food security. Even the Reagan deregulation era of the 1980s ignored agriculture. 

Today, the Farm Bill (originally the AAA) is updated every five years, holding farmers in check while bolstering a legalized racketeering system for corporate interests. “Throughout the past 22 years, the largest and wealthiest farms have always received most of the subsidies,” the Environmental Working Group (EWG) reported in 2023. Between 1995 and 2021, federal farm handouts totaled $478 billion. Seventy-eight percent of that went to the top 10 percent of recipients; 27 percent went to the top one percent. Eighty percent of recipients received nine percent of subsidies.

Additionally, it is common practice for the USDA to send farm subsidies not directly to farmers, but to banks “to help pay off farmers’ operating loans.” EWG noted that from 2019 until 2021, “the financial institution that received the most farm subsidies was the USDA.” 

A Troubling Pattern

How could government exploit its own people this way? Aren’t we a free country? Yet adding to the home-front scandal is the fact that the United States has so often helped other regimes weaponize food against their indigenous populations — even those flying communist banners.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin carried out a planned democide through artificially induced famine against Ukraine in 1932-33, known as the Holodomor. The New York Times’ Walter Duranty downplayed the Holodomor, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his propaganda and leading to the Roosevelt administration’s official recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933.

Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong imposed “agricultural reform” on his people in the 1940s and ’50s, transferring property rights to the state and sparking widespread famine. Indispensable to his success was the backing of Truman’s chief of staff, General George C. Marshall.

Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, one of the most brutal dictators in modern history, acted with the support of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. He herded Cambodians to their deaths in disease-ridden labor camps, which became known as the Killing Fields. Historians estimate around a quarter of Cambodia’s population perished in the 1970s.

Ethiopia’s communist dictatorship under Mengistu Haile Mariam forced “collectivization” of agriculture and “resettlement” programs that resulted in massive starvation in the 1980s. Credit goes to the $1 billion he received in aid from taxpayers in the United States and other Western countries, channeled through UN lending institutions such as the World Bank. (For more details of U.S. aid to foreign dictatorships throughout the 20th century, see our article on page 16, “To Make the World Safe for Communism.”)

The International Front

Yet fact-checking Heidi Beirich wants us to believe that today’s globalist bureaucrats are of a kinder and gentler ilk — that their Agenda 2030 is not a “communist plan,” but a nonbinding “feel-good guide” to end such atrocities? Let’s see what the authors of Agenda 2030 have to say about it.

The United States joined the UN in 1945, and soon that organization offered a bogeyman that dwarfed interstate commerce as an excuse for stealing land and enslaving people: “sustainable development.”

The idea came from plotters at the Club of Rome, an international think tank founded in 1968, the same year Malthusian Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb debuted. Ehrlich compared humans to a cancer destroying Mother Earth and postulated that it “must be cut out.” He suggested “a system of incentives and penalties … by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” (His work was a 20th-century version of Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798. That doomsday screed erroneously warned that population growth would soon outpace the ability of mankind to sustain itself.)

The club’s 1972 document The Limits to Growth took its cue from Ehrlich, describing a planet teetering on the edge of eco-Armageddon and warning that a “supreme effort” would be required “on a scale and scope without precedent … to organize more equitable distribution of wealth and income worldwide.”

Fewer than four months later, the UN launched its Environment Programme (UNEP). Founding director Maurice Strong, a Club of Rome adherent, would later become an advisor to the World Economic Forum (WEF). He described his hopes for the WEF to journalist Daniel Wood in the May 1990 issue of West magazine, relating the plot of a novel he wanted to write about a group of world leaders who set out to save the planet from environmental catastrophe by collapsing the economies of industrialized countries.

The Club of Rome showed its hand again in its 1991 book The First Global Revolution, writing, “In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill…. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes…. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

The following year, Strong served as secretary-general of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro — the UN conference that produced Agenda 21. President George H.W. Bush signed it on behalf of the United States. In 2015, the document was updated as Agenda 2030, with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Of particular interest to property owners and people who need to eat are:

• SDG 2, which calls for food security and sustainable agriculture, doublespeak for food scarcity and farming crises. The Netherlands and Sri Lanka provide recent tragic examples; fertilizer and pesticide restrictions, enacted to save Mother Earth, have forced farmers out of business and left the populace to face hunger and hyperinflation. 

• SDG 3, which aspires to ensure “good health and well-being.” This is the excuse we’re supposed to swallow when bureaucrats act, as they so often do, in ways directly contrary to their stated purpose. Avian influenza provides a prime example. The USDA has spent the last few months culling domestic poultry at record rates to “stop the spread” of bird flu, with confirmed cases in every state, including Alaska and Hawaii. As a result, egg prices in February topped $10 a dozen in some places, and restaurants are adding massive surcharges to egg-based meals. Curiously, prices for chicken meat did not react in kind. NPR explains that broilers (chickens raised for meat) have not been as hard-hit as egg-layers. Yet this same virus, The New York Times tells us, has migrated to cats, which are in turn infecting their owners. Fickle, jet-setting bug! (Mainstream outlets fail to mention that in February 2019, the academic journal Science reported on “controversial lab studies that modify bird flu viruses in ways that could make them more risky to humans.” The projects were so dangerous that officials had imposed a temporary moratorium, but the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases managed to get them up and running again. Déjà-flu!)

• SDG 6, which mandates “sustainable management of water supplies,” such as that planned for an arid county of west Texas, where U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill for Ireland-based, foreign-backed ETFuels’ $800 million “green” hydrogen project. It’s estimated to use around 433,000 gallons of water per day — roughly equivalent to two-thirds of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, in an area regularly plagued by drought. Energy expert Robert Bryce points out that in the production process you lose more energy than hydrogen contains, but it’s all part of Agenda 2030’s plan to decarbonize the energy industry. Farmers be damned. 

• SDG 11, which aims to make “human settlements” sustainable. This is code for 15-minute cities — a term introduced, not by conspiracy theorists, but following the 2015 UN Climate Conference. The plan is to herd people into urban areas where everything they need is within a 15-minute walk or bicycle ride and travel outside their “district” will be restricted. Some cities are already transforming into these open-air prisons; residents of Oxford, England, are required to obtain a permit to cross six major roads that demarcate the city’s zones. Urban planners are also building these future detention centers from the ground up. An example is the LEAP Project outside Lebanon, Indiana, funded by the state in cooperation with the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, which has offices in Germany, Japan, South Korea, China, Israel, Italy, and the U.K.

President Joe Biden boosted the 15-minute-city agenda in 2021 only six days after his inauguration, issuing an executive order that called for conservation (i.e., government takeover) of “at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030” to “tackle the climate crisis.” This “30x30” initiative is part of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which aims to gobble up “conserved” land for SDG 15, which favors “green” over reliable energy, and endangered species over livestock. This goal is already threatening farmland across the United States with eminent domain for boondoggles such as solar, wind, and carbon capture, all backed by hefty government subsidies.

And what will people eat as crops diminish and livestock herds are culled in the name of conservation? Let them eat bugs! That’s the target of SDG 12: “sustainable consumption and production.” The UN website brags that insects are a “food rich in protein” with a smaller production carbon footprint than livestock.

Think Global Conspiracy, Act Locally

These are only a few examples of how Agenda 2030 amounts to the latest chapter in an age-old land-grabbing textbook used by tyrants throughout history. But a crucial section of this modern chapter deals with implementation tactics. The phrase “think globally, act locally” encapsulates their plan.

J. Gary Lawrence, an advisor to President Bill Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development, detailed “The Future of Local Agenda 21 in the New Millennium” in the September 1998 issue of The Millennium Papers. But, he warned, the name Local Agenda 21 in the United States would “bring out many of the conspiracy-fixated groups and individuals.” His solution: “We call our processes something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management or smart growth.”

UN-inspired comprehensive plans are now ubiquitous. New York City’s “OneNYC 2050,” “Imagine Austin” in Texas, “OurLA2040” in California, and “We Will Chicago” are just a few examples on the home front, while “The London Plan,” “Metro Vancouver 2040,” “Plan Melbourne 2017-2050,” and Singapore’s “Master Plan” reveal that no corner of the globe is left untouched.

Tentacles entwine small towns and rural areas, too. Durango, Colorado’s comprehensive plan is filled with telling catchphrases such as “socio-economic diversity,” “sustainable behavior,” and the “unsustainability of transportation based on single occupancy vehicles.” Otsego County, New York, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, even offers Comprehensive Plan Samples and Tools, downloadable from its website. Look into what your local city council or county commission has adopted, and you will probably find similar fingerprints. It’s just as likely that your local representatives are innocently unaware of the internationalist origins, so plan to collaborate with rather than confront them to free your community of these globalist traps.

You won’t be acting alone. To save the country from such conspiratorial plots, U.S. businessman Robert Welch founded The John Birch Society in 1958. He, too, realized that local action is key to victory, and he formed his grassroots organization to educate patriots nationwide so they could combat the agenda on their home turf — a much more achievable objective than fighting faceless, far-away bureaucrats. His concept was the same as that underlying the Committees of Correspondence, formed to establish communication among the American Colonies as they strove for independence from a tyrannical oppressor.

Agenda 2030 amounts to our generation’s 1776 moment. JBS offers the resources that freedom-loving patriots need to expose the nefarious scheme and to bring about “less government, more responsibility, and — with God’s help — a better world.”