HUNGARIAN CAMPAIGN

A number of Hungarian NGOs started campaigning against gentech early last spring. This is the story.

"Two things made us start: the alarming news we,ve received from abroad on the one hand, and at the same time the draft law on genetic engineering that was being prepared by the Ministry of Agriculture on the other.

Work so far has included presswork, actions, a public debate and other activities. One of our focuses is lobbying, the other is raising public awareness. Before we started our campaign, there was no attention on GE issues whatsover in Hungary. In November we organized our second public debate. It was a very interesting experience to see how industry behaved during and after the whole thing. It seems that they - who should be competitors - made a kind of alliance, because afterwards they all flocked around one of the MPs present. From what I could pick up from their conversation they planned to make a joint plea to the Parliament to pass the law as quickly as possible and lift some of the regulations.

It was about this time that we started to suspect that our campaign was infiltrated. Still in spring, a young woman called me, saying she,s very interested in the topic, and that she was writing some sort of thesis about it. She started to come to our meetings and actions regularly, but was silent most of the time, and never took on any tasks.

It later turned out that she,s the niece of that MP who is backing the industry and our suspicions were confirmed, when a journalists friend of us had come across a paper issued by Burson-Marsteller signed by exactly this woman!

* This year we plan to do further lobbying during the parliamentary debate, bring out more information materials, and last but not least confront and expose the biotech industriess and their dirty dealings. More info: genlist@zpok.hu or vera@pship3.zpok.hu