Human resources deficient and weak
There are 41,946 officers working in the natural resources management and environment protection, which is believed to be a too small figure if compared with the volume of works.
52.2 percent of the labor force works in the land management sector, while the number of state employees in water resource management, hydrometeorology, geology and minerals just account for 3 percent. Remote and difficult areas such as the northwestern region, Central Highlands and Mekong Delta are seriously lacking management officers, while most of employees are working in big cities and the lowland.
According to the Personnel Department under the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment MONRE, a lot of state officers even do not master the provisions of the laws. A lot of officers in remote areas have not experienced any training courses, while they are working just by feeling and self-training.
Statistics show that more than 19.3 percent of communal land officials reportedly have not gone through any training courses on environment management. There are the officials, who have university degrees, working at communal authorities, but they were trained in other fields.
The lack of qualified officers has been badly affecting the implementation of the tasks on natural resources and environment management. There are three schools belonging to MONRE and 92 other schools that train environment management officers.
However, as Dr Nguyen Dinh Tuan from the HCM City University for Natural Resources and the Environment pointed out, the number of students produced by schools annually cannot meet the demand. It is very difficult to enroll students for hydrometeorology, geology and minerals majors, while students only want to follow the studies on land management.
The current problems have raised a worry that Vietnam would fail to produce enough 48,000 officers in the natural resources and environment management in 2011-2015 – the number of officers that experts believe Vietnam needs to have by 2015.
Too many ways for interpreting regulations
Environment management officers complain that they meet too many difficulties in implementing their task, including the unclear legal documents. Therefore, in many cases, the officers do not know what to do with the violations.
Some time ago, environment management officers discovered a case, where plant protection chemicals were thrown to the construction site of the project on building the Tan Son Nhat-Binh Loi road. According to Lam Hieu Nghia, a senior official of the HCM City Police said that if referring to QCVN 07:2009/BTNMT standards, the chemicals were not considered as hazardous waste. Meanwhile, if referring to QCVN 15:2008/BTNMT standards, these should be seen as hazardous waste because many indicators found in the chemicals were higher than the allowed levels stipulated in the standards.
In this case, officials still argue about whether to consider these as hazardous waste and how to treat the waste.
“A lot of legal documents have been promulgated, but we are still lacking many necessary documents,” Nghia said. “Especially, there are too many ways of interpreting the laws, which makes us unable to deal with the problems.”
The 2009 Criminal Law comprises of one chapter and 11 articles relating to the environment crimes. The articles mentioned the concepts of “seriously”, “very seriously” and “extremely serious” violations of the laws on environment.” However, to date, there has been no legal document which clarifies what “seriously”, “very seriously” and “extremely serious” means.
That explains why in many cases, though investigators believed that the violations caused very serious consequences, they could not bring the cases for criminal proceedings.
Dai Doan Ket
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