The latest attempt by the European Union to reform its common agricultural policy, at a meeting starting in Brussels on 22 February, is intended to prepare the EU for enlargement eastwards.

So runs the official line. But there are several other preoccupations for the agriculture ministers as they assemble.

The enlargement argument holds that it will not be possible to go on devoting half the EU's budget to agriculture when Polish, Czech and Hungarian farmers will be making demands on it.

But it is clear that farmers in the new eastern member states will in any case be treated as second-class.

Because under Communism subsidies went not to producers but to consumers, the EU believes, there is no need now to give the farmers subsidies they've never had.

So will this reform round add up to anything significant, or is it just tinkering around the edges ?

Wyn Grant, professor of politics at Warwick university, says the reform package, Agenda 2000, "is starting to look rather more substantial".

Eastern Europe's farms are dire

He sees it as an attempt by the EU to meet commitments it made under the last GATT round, which required it to reduce export subsidies.

And Professor Grant thinks that, depending on the shape of the final reforms, the EU will be a little better equipped for the next round of negotiations at the World Trade Organisation, GATT's successor.

Ignoring real needs

Tim Lang, who describes himself as "a utopian pragmatist", is professor of food policy at Thames Valley university.

He says the CAP has never tackled consumer needs, health or environmental priorities, or the demands of social justice.

"The CAP serves rich consumers who want cheap food. And that means unloading the environmental damage, in the form of prairie farming, poor welfare, excessive chemicals, and transporting food for long distances.

US farmers have a lot to unload

"Agenda 2000 aims to maintain the cheap food policy, allowing agri-business to avoid the cost of supporting farmers properly by buying its supplies wherever they are cheapest.

"The reforms will mean reduced support for production, and increased support by way of compensatory payments for things like looking after hedges.

"That will be chocolate-box farming, with no real environmental gain - and it will intensify the trend towards larger and larger farms."

Professor Lang believes there is a hidden agenda behind the CAP reforms - a struggle for supremacy in the world food trade.

The next World Trade Organisation round is due to start in Seattle at the end of November, and that, he believes, will be the real battleground.

US agriculture, says Professor Lang, wants to sell its huge surpluses to the hungry world - something it made clear at the World Food Summit talks in Rome in 1996.

"The EU is nailing its colours firmly to the mast of free trade", he says.

"The US wants to break the EU's power. It sees the CAP as a major impediment to its goal of feeding the world."