Elena Samoila used to ride a rickety bicycle to deliver her home-bred poultry to Danube river towns until the bird flu virus decimated her flock. Like many farmers in the Romanian village of Tonea, a few kilometres across the river border with Bulgaria, she supports herself by growing maize and selling fowl on the black market.
When Romania and its poor ex-communist neighbour Bulgaria join the European Union, she and millions of others eking out a living from subsistence farming will be banned from selling their produce this way.
Thousands may also lose work when decaying Soviet-era farms and filthy, virtually bankrupt slaughterhouses, which the EU says pose a high risk to public health, are shut down.
The poor Balkan states, which inherited outdated farming sectors from the pre-1989 communist regimes, will gobble up billions of euros in Brussels aid once they join the bloc as they try to cope with stiff competition in the single market.
The European Commission will recommend on May 16 whether Romania and Bulgaria should join in 2007 or face a delay until 2008 because they are deemed to have failed to make sufficient progress in fighting corruption and undertaking other reforms.
Samoila, a tiny 63-year-old woman who lost most of her 150 birds to bird flu, has little hope of getting help, because her farm is too small to get cash from Brussels, whose direct payments go only to farms larger than 1 hectare (2.5 acres).
"My business is ruined. I had some good clients but I have nothing to sell. I didn't know a chicken could kill," she said.
"I don't expect the EU to help. What can they give me?"
As well as making a recommendation on accession, the European Commission could also limit the countries' access to the single market later this year if veterinary standards are not up to scratch.
Because of the legacy of the pre-1989 communist regime, farming is one of the most difficult areas of convergence, and both states still have to tackle animal genetics, health and hygiene, and upgrade technology in the food processing sector. The first bird flu outbreak occurred in Romania late last year, prompting the closely-monitored EU candidate to enforce stricter biosecurity rules and trade restrictions.
Romania culled hundreds of thousands of fowl and gradually stopped all outbreaks, winning praise from Brussels which had said last year food safety standards were a serious concern.
"The anti-flu campaign was a success. Testing and diagnostic facilities are effective. It didn't go unnoticed," said Mihai Dumitru, the EU's farm expert in Romania.
The outbreak of bird flu in Romania forced farmers to take action to comply with EU standards faster than they might otherwise have done by showing them the danger of allowing animal diseases to spread.
Many poor villagers have cleared their yards of geese and chickens which used to roam muddy streets in places like Tonea.
"Peasants understood how serious disease threats are and how pressing the issue of food safety is," said Adam Stefan, head of a modern lab that can detect food contamination in seconds.
"Most have stopped breeding fowl because they are afraid."
But authorities say it will take years to convince many villagers to fence their flocks in. They will also need to pool their resources to create bigger farms which can rely on the EU's direct farm payments.
The Balkan EU candidates are not alone. Brussels had been concerned that the far more advanced Poland and Hungary had yet to ensure that people consumed only food meeting EU safety norms just months before they joined the bloc in 2004.
Post-communist governments have tried for years to persuade small farmers to surrender control of their land to private associations which can easier benefit from EU subsidies.
Millions of farmers in Romania and Bulgaria till tiny plots of land averaging 1.5 to 3 hectares (3.7-7.4 acres), a fraction of the usual size of farms in the European Union.
Experts say farm fragmentation will end in time as ageing farmers, who received small plots of land when the Soviet-era collectives collapsed, give up subsistence farming.
Bulgaria will get a total of 1.5 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in farm-related funds from the EU in the first three years after accession. In Romania, the first chunk of aid will be 440 million euros annually or around 1.5 percent of its budget expenditure and rise gradually to 700 million by the end of the decade.
Quick change is also needed in the food processing sector which must meet EU norms by January if it wants to remain in business.
Only 9 percent of Romania's 1,400 meat processing plants have been awarded permits to export to the EU so far.
"Before the end of the year, we will have 400 units able to export. We are better positioned than Poland two years ago," chief veterinarian Ion Agafitei said.
But many production units will close in the coming months because they cannot carry the costs of compliance, he added.
Officials in Bulgaria, where less than 10 percent of meat processing facilities have been given the green light, are hopeful because of the expected lower cost compared to Romania of upgrading the country's facilities because they are smaller and already better equipped.
"All dairies and meat processing plants will be ready and meet the EU requirements by September 1," said Paskal Zheliazkov from the National Veterinary Office.
A few kilometres away from Samoila's village, at one of the country's biggest chicken farms, the prospects are encouraging.
Gheorghe Dume invested millions of euros in decaying farms he took over from the state. He said: "We're racing to upgrade biosecurity standards to the EU's latest technology."