Two weekends ago the centre of Warsaw was packed with angry farmers, demanding that their government seek parity of treatment with EU farmers as part of their accession deal. If the EU's farmers got income support, so should they. It would have been enough to make any Commission farm official's blood run cold.

More than 4.2 million people work full time on the land in Poland, 27 per cent of the labour force. In Ireland, agriculture employs 146,000, or 12 per cent of the workforce and farmers receive on average £1.5 billion a year from the Common Agriculture Policy.

Parity for the Poles is not even conceivable. An unreformed CAP, based on subsidised prices or cheques to every eastern European farmer, would bankrupt the Union. The imperative to reform CAP is not only enlargement - it stems from a looming internal challenge of monumental proportions. EU agriculture has quite simply outgrown CAP.

Imagine the Irish countryside covered with more than half a million grain silos, lined up in serried ranks as far as the horizon in all directions. That is what would be required to store the EU's cereal surplus by 2005. Unless CAP is re formed by then, EU production and demand forecasts mean tax payers will have to store 58 mil

lion tonnes of cereals in intervention, paying rent to the owners of the stores and the price of the grain to farmers for produce which can never see the market.

Nor can it be exported: under the GATT agreement - and its likely successor - export quotas of subsidised farm products are severely restricted.

Why, our competitors on the world market ask, should we allow you to compete unfairly with us? We could pay farmers to take a fifth of their land out of production, but how morally defensible would that be when the world population keeps growing, by 85 million people a year between 1995 and 2005?

Without reform, there would be buoyant world markets and prices from which European farmers would be excluded.

Picture a mass of 4.5 million cattle, the size of the entire Irish herd, frozen, hooked in a landscape of massive freezer stores. Unsellable, but we would still be paying the farmers for the meat and rent - indefinitely - for storing 1.5 million tonnes of meat.

These are food mountains the like of which the Union has never seen. Why? Because under CAP, the Union guarantees to support prices to farmers by buying up excess production so that a glut does not depress the market. It is one thing balancing a market basically in equilibrium, quite another when it is likely to be permanently out of kilter with no outlets for surpluses other than intervention.

The EU has no choice but to cut its prices to world levels to allow surplus production to be sold where there is a demand - on the world markets. Few doubt that logic, even the farm organisations accept the need to move from price support to direct income support. The problem is how to compensate farmers for the price cuts. That can be done with the savings realised by ending intervention and massive export subsidies.

Following the Mac Sharry reforms of 1992, of which the current package is a logical continuation, farmers complained bitterly that their incomes would fall, yet they rose significantly, as did the overall cost of the CAP.

Compensation was so generous in the cereals sector that it became a cause of scandal - cereal farmers throughout the EU received £6.5 billion in overcompensation for price cuts which never happened. When the Commission cut intervention prices, it compensated farmers on the basis that real prices would fall as far. They didn't and the power of the farm lobby was such that ministers were unwilling to cut the aid.

This time compensation payments are pitched at a level to compensate for only part of the fall in the intervention price - at 50 per cent of the price fall for cereals, 80 per cent for beef and 70 per cent for dairy producers.

If prices do fall to the intervention level, the IFA's projected losses will be proved right. If they don't fall as far, farmers may even make a profit - though that is unlikely. The truth is that once again, the cost of the CAP reform will be an increase in the CAP budget, this time by more than £5 billion in real terms for the current 15 member-states. Cutbacks?

To be fair, Irish farmers did not benefit significantly from the cereals bonanza and last year they took a real cut of 2.8 per cent in their incomes, but between 1989 and 1996, their relative purchasing power increased against the EU average from 81 to 88 per cent and between 1990 and 1996, real incomes increased 30 per cent.

What then of the poor farmers in eastern Europe? The Commission is blunt: you can't be compensated for what you never had. Farm prices in Poland are already 3040 per cent below EU levels, roughly on a par with world market prices, so no question of income support.

The Commission argues Poland needs help in restructuring its markets, developing expertise, finding capital for farmers to invest in land, expanding and making professional the agri-food sector and administrative structures.