EU Six Defend Farming Subsidies

France and six other European Union countries are insisting that the common agricultural policy, which consumes half of the EU budget, must be kept at levels agreed three years ago.

Signalling a looming battle over farm subsidies which will be critical in talks on the eastward expansion of the union, Hervé Gaymard, the French agriculture minister, and colleagues from Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Austria and Luxembourg, insist in a letter to the Guardian that the CAP is unjustly pilloried.

Rejecting "false accusations", they defend a "European model of agriculture", and predict tough arguments ahead.

France, which receives the biggest farming subsidies, understandably champions the policy, which is the legacy of a deal between French farmers and German industry when the EEC was founded in 1957.

Britain, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands - the "Northern Alliance" - want urgent reform of a policy which costs €49bn (£31bn). They say the CAP cannot continue in its current form in a union of 25 or more members.

The 15 member states must quickly agree on the level of farm payments to be made to the 10 candidate states likely to be invited to join at December's Copenhagen summit.

Poland, the largest applicant, has 10 million farmers, but there is already anger over the double standards implied by proposals to pay them just a quarter of the subsidies enjoyed by current EU members.

CAP critics blame the policy for wasteful over-production, environmental damage, crises such as BSE, and contributing to hunger in the developing world. The ministers reject this and offer a robust defence of the special needs of farmers.

"Society needs sufficient numbers of contented producers with confidence in the future to ensure... economic balance and to maintain the diversity of our landscapes, which epitomise Europe.

"For us, agricultural products are more than marketable goods; they are the fruit of a love of an occupation and of the land... developed over many generations."

Last summer, the European commission proposed deep CAP subsidy cuts and higher environmental and health standards. The reformists say it does not go far enough.