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Summary: For some time conservationists have been
warning of potentially grave environmental
consequences of European Union (EU)
expansion in the absence of reform of the
Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Now,
Donald et al.1 provide alarming evidence
that, for farmland birds at least, such fears
are well founded. Their study relates
changes in bird populations, in EU and
nonEU eastern European countries, to
measures of agricultural intensity, such as
cereal and milk yield, and numbers of
tractors or workers per farm. A principal
component analysis results in countries
separating into clear categories along an
axis representing a gradient of agricultural
intensity. Not surprisingly, many eastern
and southern European countries, such as
Spain, Greece, Croatia, Latvia and Romania,
fall at the low-intensity end of the scale with
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