LONDON: President Bush is preparing to bury a radical French plan which would help some of the world’s poorest farmers by ending the dumping of subsidized western food in Africa. A war of words over the plight of the world’s poorest continent was brewing on Thursday after European officials accused the US of blocking the ban on export subsidies. In a separate attack, Mr Bush blamed European opposition to GM foods for causing hunger in Africa.

France’s President Chirac had been hoping that next month’s G8 summit in Evian, France, of the world’s eight most powerful countries would be a chance to unite western leaders around a rescue plan for Africa and heal the deep rift between Paris and Washington over the war in Iraq.

But the chances of a trans-Atlantic rapprochement were looking slim this week as public criticism of Europe’s aid policies from Mr Bush was accompanied by behind-the-scenes attempts by US officials to remove any reference to America’s giant export subsidies for its own farmers from the leaders’ discussions.

Mr Bush said opposition in Europe to GM had forced several starving sub-Saharan African countries to refuse American GM food aid.

“European governments should join — not hinder — the great cause of ending hunger in Africa,” he told the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut on Wednesday.

Last week Washington mounted a legal challenge at the World Trade Organization to Europe’s moratorium on GM food imports.

Mr Bush said he would be using the Evian summit to urge EU governments to cut the $4 billion a year they spend subsidizing farm exports. But the White House is vehemently opposed to any discussion at the G8 of cuts to its own export-support programmes, which campaigners estimate total $3.5 to $4 billion.

Aid agencies are pressing Tony Blair to use his “special relationship” with Mr Bush to persuade Washington to back the Chirac plan, which would help put a floor under commodity prices on which most African economies rely.

Campaigners were highly critical of the G8 last year for its failure to deliver a blueprint for African reconstruction, despite raising expectations ahead of the summit.

France now fears that the fall-out from the war against Saddam will poison this year’s event and make even a repeat of the modest scale of help offered last year in Canada unlikely.

“American opposition to this plan is so strong, they will be negotiating over it right up until the wire,” said one G8 official. “We might end up with nothing.”

Washington’s counter-proposal is believed to be a vast expansion of its subsidized food aid programme, allowing it to pump even more money into American farms under the guise of aid.

Aid agencies say that while European subsidies are more transparent, America’s support for its farmers is equally damaging to poor countries which cannot compete with highly subsidised imports.

America’s 25,000 cotton farmers collected $4 billion from Washington last year, allowing them to sell their goods abroad at half the cost of production, at the expense of far more efficient producers in West Africa. Without government support most American cotton farms would go out of business, but Oxfam estimates they cost West Africa $200 million a year in lost exports.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.