Agence France Presse | By Jitendra Joshi | June 24, 2003
The European Union will Wednesday launch its third attempt in three weeks to reform the Common Agricultural Policy, in the face of fierce French resistance to ending the CAP's generous subsidies.
EU farm ministers will open the latest meeting in Luxembourg after two previous attempts failed to break down opposition to a CAP reform plan from a farming lobby led by France.
Negotiations were suspended last Thursday at the personal request of French President Jacques Chirac, who appears in no mood to compromise.
"France is quite ready to discuss this but the current Commission proposals are not acceptable and will not be accepted by France," Chirac told reporters at an EU summit in Greece on Friday.
The European Commission is trying to push through reform of a system of subsidies that gobbles up about 44 billion euros -- nearly half of all annual EU spending.
The EU's executive arm argues that an unreformed CAP could bankrupt the bloc when it expands next year to take in 10 more countries, many of which like Poland are heavily agricultural.
France gains the most from the CAP, followed by Spain, Greece and Ireland. Germany is the biggest net contributor, but has cooked up a compromise reform plan with France that the two tried but failed last week to foist on the rest.
The main plank of the Commission's proposals is to "decouple" the link between farmers' production levels and their subsidies from 2005.
It also wants to cut the prices at which the EU intervenes to buy produce from cereal and dairy farmers.
Opponents of the CAP say that by directly subsidising EU farmers, the policy encourages massive surpluses that are dumped on markets of poorer countries.
But proposals by Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler to have only a partial decoupling of the subsidies have been rejected as insufficient, with France pushing for much more generous terms.
In theory, a vote on reforming the CAP could pass with a "qualified majority" of member states. But in practice few expect a deal to stand up without French support.
A spokesman for German Agriculture Minister Renate Kuenast said last week that "we are quite close to a fundamental reform of the CAP".
But in a nod to France, he said "it wouldn't make sense to adopt a reform without the biggest agricultural nation in the European Union".
Apart from the EU's enlargement next year, pressure for reform is also growing at the World Trade Organisation.
The United States, backed by the European Commission, has warned that the entire Doha round of liberalisation talks at the WTO could fail unless agricultural subsidies for the world's wealthiest nations are reformed.
A diplomat from Britain, one of the countries pushing hardest for CAP reform, said there were grounds for optimism at this week's Luxembourg talks.
"As things were left on Thursday, the vast majority of delegations were able to support the package on the table," he said. "We'll have to see where we are tomorrow."
Another EU diplomat said France could not hold out forever.
"We would agree that on something that's very important for a country you try to go as far as you can towards their position," he said.
"But ultimately, sometimes, you simply have to take a decision."Agence France Presse:
