AN ELDERLY ROMANIAN WOMAN WALKS BENTS UNDER A HEAVY BUNDLE OF BRANCHES, 2002-12-19 (photo)

An elderly Romanian peasant walks bent under a heavy bundle of branches picked for a cooking fire in Gura Vaii village (150km east of Bucharest) in this October 2002 picture. The EU invited Romania to join the Union in 2007 and hard efforts are due to modernise rural infrastructure and improve the processing and marketing of farm products. Romania, where half of the 21.6 million population does not have access to running water, is striving to reform its backward agricultural sector, one of the hardest tasks as it moves towards EU membership. TO GO WITH FEATURE STORY BC-ROMANIA-EU. REUTERS/Bogdan Cristel BC/WS