The New Europe: After May 1, East Europe's 'Haves' May Have More

As Europe expands in a quest for prosperity and elusive unity, many among its new members in the East fear that hundreds of thousands of people may be left behind in a new underclass, throwbacks to the lost era of command economies and state control.

The European Union has always known its relative disparities, and to create a unified whole it has over the decades self-consciously transferred wealth from richer countries like Germany and Luxembourg to poorer ones like Portugal, Greece and Ireland.

But never before has the union invited into its well-padded ranks the kind of economic malaise to be found in rural Poland, the eastern reaches of Slovakia and Hungary and the countryside of the Baltics.

So daunting is the challenge that the 15 current members have decided that leveling the playing field is not an option, at least not fully, not for the foreseeable future.
Most of the agricultural subsidies that take up almost half of the European Commission's annual budget of $120 billion will not be available to farmers...in the other new eastern members, because extending the benefit was deemed too costly.
Farm subsidies for the new entrants will start at just a quarter of the western levels, rising to parity only by 2013. In the meantime, small-scale farmers in the East worry that they will be wiped out by agribusiness in the West, where subsidies on average provide a quarter of the income of most current European Union farmers.

That really stinks. Welcome to Europe!