June 21, 2003	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 20,1424

LUXEMBOURG, June 20: After their second failure in two weeks to reform the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), EU farm ministers still have a long way to go if they are to strike a deal next week.

The talks in Luxembourg broke up late on Thursday with no agreement on compromise proposals designed to rein in the European Union’s big spending on subsidies for farmers.

The ministers agreed to reconvene next Wednesday, having already broken off negotiations once last week. The European Commission, whose reform proposals have been consistently blocked by an influential lobby of farming countries led by France, put a brave face on the latest failure.

“There is still some way to go but we are rather confident that we will get a real and necessary reform of the Common Agricultural Policy next week,” said a spokesman for Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler on Friday.

“This is of course up to the member states,” he added.

“We are ready to do our part to facilitate a deal within certain limits: the core of the reform to make our farm policy more competitive, more environmentally friendly and more trade friendly needs to be preserved.”

A deal this week would have meant one less headache for EU heads of government at a three-day summit which began late Thursday in Greece. But despite round-the-clock efforts by Fischler to broker a deal, the EU has still to reform a system of subsidies that consumes nearly half its annual budget of 90 billion euros ($107 billion).

Opponents of the current system say that by directly subsidising EU farmers, the CAP encourages massive surpluses that are dumped on markets of poorer countries.

Brussels has proposed a raft of measures that it says would make European farming more efficient and also strengthen the EU’s hand at World Trade Organization (WTO) talks.

But the reforms have met with a barrage of opposition.

According to EU sources, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain all rejected Fischler’s latest compromise plan, which had been amended twice in two days.

Proposals by Fischler to have only a partial decoupling of the subsidies were rejected as insufficient.

French Agriculture Minister Herve Gaymard said the latest package still did not go far enough but welcomed progress that he said “means things could move”.

Spanish Agriculture Minister Miguel Arias Canete said: “There will have to be additional progress if we’re to reach an agreement.”

The United States upped the pressure by saying the EU holds the key to unlocking the WTO’s trade liberalization drive.

“The message that comes through crystal clear from all quarters is that the key to moving forward significantly right now is agriculture and the group that holds that key is the European Union,” US deputy trade representative Peter Allgeier said in Geneva.—AFP