The clever HuMuSz (lobbying, expert’s opinion)

Besides mapping illegal waste dumps, organising the collection of waste paper in offices or lecturing at schools HuMuSz gives its opinion on professional conceptions and bills. As an example we can take the draft of the National Waste Management Plan (2002) on which HuMuSz, the Association of Hungarian Environmentalists, and the Air Work Group (two other significant Hungarian organisations) gave an expert opinion (quotation from a Kukabúvár issued in 2002):

“Much to our surprise – unlikely to the practice so far – we got more time to formulate our opinion, so writing the essential criticism was not made impossible from the very first. Moreover, the National Waste Management Plan was put on the homepage of the Ministry. (…) One of our most important expectations was the precise publication of the goals, tasks, and sources with naming those who are responsible. Unfortunately, the current Plan does not live up to our expectations. (…) The problem of the whole Plan is the unreliability of its published data. Even the publisher of the Plan admits that both the registry and the supply of data systems are incomplete, and in our opinion a significant part of the published data is only based on estimation or made up, or obviously inaccurate. The question emerges: How can a serious waste management plan be made based on these data?”

According to HuMuSz, there has been a great problem with data in the Environmental and Infrastructure Operative Program of the National Development Plan (NDP) as well – our critique was published in the winter issue of Kukabúvár in 2002:

“The data on waste in NDP do not match with the data published by the National Waste Management Plan. For example, according to NDP the quantity of the arising waste is 69 million tons, but the Plan claims that it is 70-75 million tons, and HuMuSz estimated it to be 85-90 million tons.”

Furthermore, HuMuSz thinks that the Hungarian government misunderstood what the National Development Plan was made for, since the opinion of the NGOs had not been really taken into account:

“It is not a development plan, but a plan how to obtain money from EU, because it “develops” only in those territories where the European Union is willing to give money (or rather technology?). The report on the Strategy was not even finished, when the “complete” operative programs had been taken out of the drawers, so there was no possibility of a decent consideration of the public opinion.”