In a valley of southeastern Poland, the town of Rudnik's pot-holed roads, widespread unemployment and subsistence farmers provide a stark contrast to the image of economic good times after one year in the European Union.
Standing in the centre of Rudnik, where there are a church and district administrative offices but no businesses, it is hard to visualise that Poland's economy is one of the most buoyant in the bloc.
Foreign direct investment in Poland reached 6.04 billion euros (7.7 billion dollars) in 2004, and exports have grown 25 percent since the central European country joined the bloc on May 1 last year.
But not in Rudnik or its region of Lubelskie, the poorest in the EU.
Here, there is no investment, direct or otherwise. The positive changes brought to Poland by EU membership have had little effect on improving lives.
In Lubelskie, the average wage is just 32 percent of the EU average, according to Eurostat, the EU's statistical office.
Out of the 1,200 farms that stretch out along the roads leading away from Rudnik into the hills, only 100 produce enough crops to sell on the open market.
The other farmers in and around Rudnik eke out a living by subsistence farming, said Mayor Tadeusz Zdunek.
The only way to get to the town, which lies 70 kilometers (50 miles) outside the main regional city of Lublin, is by car or a bus that provides an irregular service along the region's dilapidated roads, most of which have not seen a maintenance team for years.
As far as Zdunek can recall, no one has ever offered to invest in his farm or his town. Rudnik has not tasted EU manna, mainly because it has no viable projects to propose to those who dole out European funds.
Inhabitants of the village of Maszow, which lies perched atop a hill near Rudnik, fondly remember the communist era when farmers had a sure market for their crops and made a comfortable living.
"Today, the price of wheat has plummeted, while fertiliser and fuel prices do not stop going up," village Mayor Jan Bujnowski, 50, said.
"The land can no longer feed us. Without social security, we would surely have died of hunger by now," he said.
An electrician by trade, Bujnowski took over the family farm seven years ago when the company he worked for went bust. He grows mainly wheat and linseed, but earns his daily crust by doing odd jobs for the neighbours.
"This region, which belonged to tsarist Russia after Poland was divided in the 18th century, has always been poor and ignored," said Ryszard Boguszewski of the regional council of Lublin.
"The few large companies set up here by the communists went under with the transition to a free market economy in 1989. Today, around 38 percent of the population works in agriculture, which generates only 4.8 percent of the region's gross domestic product," he said.
The population of Maszow has dwindled as young people leave for better lives in big cities.
"No one lives over there. A 70-year-old man lives there and a couple of 80-year-olds over there. Almost all the young people have left," said 23-year-old Stanislawa Kacperczyk-Skibicka, who has stayed in Maszow to run her parents' goose farm.
"There used to be 120 children at the school here. Today, there are only 25 kids, and they take the bus to go to school in Rudnik," eight kilometersmiles) distant, said Mayor Bujnowski.
Entire households live on the meagre pensions of elderly family members -- the zloty equivalent of between 150 and 200 euros a month.
"It's better to have a grandmother with a pension at your farmstead than a milk cow," one farmer said, not without bitterness.
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