The French presidency bequeathed its neighbours the Mediterranean union; the Czechs assiduously promoted the Eastern Partnership; Sweden came up with the Baltic Sea strategy. Now, from Hungary, it is the Danube.

The Danube Region strategy, expected to be adopted by ministers in April 2011, aims to make the areas along the banks of the famous river more prosperous, more closely related, and more in tune with nature.

A plan proposed by the European Commission last week (9 December) aims at increasing cargo on the Danube by 20% by 2020, bringing fast broadband to all citizens in the region by 2013, and restoring nutrients to the river. Other aims are equally diverse: from tackling organised crime to boosting the sturgeon population.

Many of these ideas are not new – and neither is any new money available – but the intention is to give momentum to long-standing goals, and to guide the spending of the €100 billion in European money already allocated to the region. The Commission calculates that the region includes 115 million people in 14 countries – including eight EU member states.

The tension between economic development and nature protection is likely to cause the sharpest conflicts during discussion of the plan. WWF, an environmental campaign group, is especially concerned about the goals for increasing cargo traffic. “Heavy investments in dyking and dredging the Danube have been justified by various officials with reference to the Rhine river. But the Rhineland has very different conditions from the Danube area, with an industrial base that has developed over centuries and not just thanks to the river,” said Andreas Beckmann, director of the WWF Danube-Carpathian programme, last week.

“Expecting an economic miracle from investments in Danube navigation is a myth, and potentially a very costly mistake,” he said.

Toxic sludge

Environmentalists are also concerned about lax controls over toxic industrial sites, an issue that was overlooked until last October, when a tide of red sludge swept into streams and homes near Ajka, a town around 100 kilometres from Budapest, with loss of life and a devastating cost to the environment. The sludge also entered the Danube. Six weeks after the disaster, the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River said the fish population in the affected part of the Danube had returned to normal, but concentrations of heavy metals, notably mercury and aluminium, were still above legal limits. Cleaning up the Ajka area will take far longer.

Authorities had already conducted an inventory of risky sites, but officials now concede that not enough attention has been paid to preventing disasters. Unless the Danube Region strategy gives new impetus to these efforts, it could become just a paper relic of a former presidency.

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