The rumor got started in the Baltic states last month, then swept across all of Central and Eastern Europe. Alzbeta Santúrová, a retiree who lives in the south Slovak village of Bajc, heard one version of it last week: the price of sugar was about to skyrocket from the current 98¢ per kilo to around $1.34. So Santúrová is stocking up; she is buying 50 kg. "I am afraid," says Santúrová, 65, who lives on a $170-a-month pension. "I need at least 60 kg of sugar to make wine every year ... God forbid I let myself be caught off guard." She also plans to buy at least 10 kg of rice, and already has 10 L of sunflower oil.

You might think a war or hurricane was about to hit the region. But the buying panic was triggered by the approach of May 1, when 10 new countries join the European Union,

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) most of them in Central and Eastern Europe. On the street, there is a widespread belief that E.U. accession will drive prices way up. Panic buying and hoarding started with salt and sugar in the Baltics; Poland followed with sugar, construction materials and cars. In the Czech Republic, it has been sugar, rice and, of all things, haircuts, with people pre-paying their trips to the salon.

What's behind the hysteria? E.U. accession will bring about changes in taxation, tariffs and price support. This means that the price of dairy products in Poland, for example, could rise 10-30% and that an $11 haircut in the Czech Republic will cost $12.50 due to higher vat. Anticipating a hike, many consumers are returning to buying practices learned during earlier regimes. "It's a conditioned reflex going back to the communist times," says Adéla Seidlová, head of the Center for Public Opinion Research in Prague. "Everybody knows it's better to stock up than face uncertainty."

And stocking up they are. Egged on by Russian television stations gleefully portraying imminent price increases as punishment for E.U. accession, Latvians stripped their store shelves bare of salt, buying more in a day than previously in an entire month. The Estonians followed suit, fearing the price of salt would triple or quadruple.

Yevgeni Boldyrev of the Tallinn-based grocery supplier Haljas Company told Vesti, Russian State Television's news program, that his company sold 2,000 tons of sugar in March, five times the normal amount. In Poland, customers went on a sugar-buying frenzy in the last week of March, forcing some stores to limit purchases to 10 kg per customer and driving sugar prices 50% higher. A headline in Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading daily, called it white fever. The more affluent Czechs have been slower to catch on, though by mid-April they, too, were hoarding sugar and rice.

Is the panic justified? Yes and no. Prices for everything from cement to dry cleaning to bananas will go up as vat rates rise and other duties take effect in line with E.U. rules. But rising prices will be partly offset by cheaper imports of potatoes, French wine, Spanish olives and Italian pasta. "There is no need to panic," says Markéta Sichtarová, chief economist at Volksbank in Prague. "We expect the overall impact on prices to be no greater than 1%." And reports of hoarding can be exaggerated, says Tomás Drtina, managing partner of INCOMA Research, a market research company in Prague. "I would say 5% of the population acts in this way," he says. "It's the same people who filled their bathtubs with gasoline when prices were to rise under communism. Now they go and buy 30 kg of rice."

Still, the panic is a political windfall for conservative parties who opposed enlargement. For example, Poland's radical Samoobrona (Self-Defense) party has surged in opinion polls from 17% approval in February to 29% in April. Whether accession's opponents can capitalize in the long run on price fears will depend on what happens in coming weeks. In the meantime, Eastern Europe has a few more shopping days until accession.

• JAN STOJASPAL | Prague
• The citizens of "New" Europe are hoarding everything from sugar to cars as accession looms