Two farmers, one Europe, yet worlds apart

Just four miles separate the farms of Austrian Friedrich Gabler and Czech Jan Vasa, but they have never met.

Twelve years after the Iron Curtain fell, the Austro-Czech border, which cuts through the hills between their farms, remains the dividing line between two worlds - one rich, the other poor. That division is likely to remain even after the Czech Republic takes its expected place alongside Austria and other current members of the European Union.

Of all the contentious issues of EU expansion, agricultural policy is the most divisive.

The EU, expected this week to invite the Czechs and nine other nations to join by 2004, lavishes generous farm subsidies on its current members. But farmers in the newcomer states are to receive only a quarter of what those in current members states do - along with a promise that the gap will be closed eventually.

EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler says the arrangement is fair because Eastern European farmers do not have to contend with the high production costs and quality controls that their Western counterparts do.

Some observers disagree. "It isn't fair at all, but the candidate countries don't have a lot of choice," says Heather Grabbe, an analyst with the Center for European Reform, a British think tank. "At this point, they [the newcomer countries] are very keen to finish the deal and get in[to the EU]. It is clear that the new states will receive much less than the current members do."

EU membership has been the top political goal for Central and Eastern European countries in the decade since the Iron Curtain fell. But farmers in the candidate countries - including the Czech Republic and its neighbors Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary - fear that EU conditions will "liquidate" their farms.

Last week, more than 10,000 farmers hurled potatoes through the windows of the Czech Ministry of Agriculture, the office handling negotiations with the EU on rural aid.

As the EU's Copenhagen summit neared, current EU members bickered over a proposal to raise farm subsidies for the 10 newcomers as a way of sweetening entrance deals.

The EU spends $49 billion a year, half its total budget, on agricultural subsidies. The next wave of enlargement will double the number of farmers in the Union, and its executive body, the European Commission, fears a budgetary crisis if subsidies are extended equally to the newcomers.

But it is farmers in the member states who are most in danger, says Miroslav Toman, the Czech Ministry of Agriculture's chief negotiator, predicting that EU membership will trigger bankruptcies among Czech farmers. "We are concentrating on achieving [more advantageous production] quotas for our farms within the EU," Mr. Toman says.

In Austria, Mr. Gabler receives about $28,000 per year in subsidies for his 75-acre farm. He produces seed potatoes and milk with the help of a shiny stainless-steel milking machine and a fleet of loaders and tractors. His products are certified organic, which brings in extra support from Brussels - support he says his 400-year-old family farm desperately needs.

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