Forty thousand angry farmers are expected to converge on Brussels today to demonstrate against changes to the Common Agricultural Policy. More than one-third of them will be Germans. German farmers have spent much of the last month on the streets, heckling the German chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, in prosperous Bavaria and blocking roads in impoverished Mecklenburg.
Mr Gerd Sonnleitner, president of the German Farmers' Union, insists his members are not just making a fuss in advance of today's negotiations - they are engaged in a fight for survival. "We hope that there won't be any trouble. We want to draw attention to our situation through exclusively democratic means and we reject the use of violence." Mr Sonnleitner claims that if the planned reforms become a reality, up to 60,000 of Germany's 500,000 farms will go out of business and a similar number of people in the food industry will lose their jobs. "The whole agriculture and food industry will be decisively weakened by Agenda 2000 and it will produce many, many unemployed," he said.
Germany's farmers could depend on a sympathetic ear in Bonn during the 16 years of Dr Helmut Kohl's tenure as Chancellor. Both Dr Kohl's Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, depend on farmers' votes and neither party was keen to offend such a vociferous interest group.
Few farmers vote for Mr Schroder's Social Democrats much less his coalition partners the Greens, so the new government has taken a more robust approach to the issue of farming subsidies.
One of Mr Schroder's key aims in the Agenda 2000 negotiations is to reduce Germany's disproportionately large contribution to the European Union budget. With more than four million out of work and the economy entering a period of slow growth, Germans are increasingly unhappy with their traditional role as Europe's paymasters.
The Chancellor knows the only way to ensure a cut in his country's budget contribution is to make savings on agriculture subsidies, which account for half the money Brussels spends.
Mr Schroder hoped to persuade his European partners to accept the principle of "national co-financing" of farm subsidies under which Brussels would share with national governments the burden of supporting the farmers. But the proposal found little favour with other member-states apart from Britain, and Bonn now appears willing to agree to a system of progressively reducing subsidies.
German farmers reject the basic principle behind the reform - a reduction in the guaranteed prices paid to farmers for milk, wheat and beef regardless of demand. Mr Sonnleitner says the proposal is unfair because unlike those who run other industries, farmers cannot move their production to cheaper locations. "Price reductions such as those planned here would strike a blow at the heart of agriculture. But if we are given prices that are appropriate to our location, we won't need compensation payments."
If prices are cut without the guarantee of long-term support for farmers' incomes, Mr Sonnleitner predicts that his members' anger will boil over into bigger protests.
"That would make matters much, much worse because it would be a breach of trust. We have been reassured time and again that we will receive reliable and lasting compensation payments if our prices are cut. Now this promise is to be totally broken," he said.