Homeless encampments stress Hungarian forests

Damage to the forests surrounding Budapest can be calculated in the tens of millions of forints when homeless people move in, cutting down young trees for cooking fires, building huts that damage the environment and frightening hikers with their aggressive dogs, wrote Tuesday's national daily Magyar Nemzet.

The paper noted that a programme initiated two years ago to find homes for the forest dwellers appears to have petered out.

Gergely Lomniczi, spokesman for the company managing the forests, warns that there is also an acute danger of forest fires.

Miklos Vecsei, vice president of the Maltese Charities and a former ministry official, called for reviving the programme to find homes for the forest dwellers.

His organization is already at work on it, he told Magyar Nemzet, and is limited only by funding.

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