  In spontaneously broken supergravity with non-flat potential the vanishing of
the cosmological constant is usually associated with a non-trivial balancing of
two opposite-sign contributions. We make the simple observation that, in an
appropriately defined expansion of the superfield action in inverse powers of
$M_P$, this tuning corresponds to the absence of two specific operators. It is
then tempting to speculate what kind of non-standard symmetry or structural
principle might underlie the observed extreme smallness of the corresponding
coefficients in the real world. Independently of such speculations, the
suggested expansion appears to be a particularly simple and convenient starting
point for the effective field theory analysis of spontaneously broken
supergravity models.
