CERNOBBIO, Oct 25: The European Union needs a market-orientated sugar policy to counter charges by poor countries that the bloc dumps the product on export markets, EU farm chief Franz Fischler said on Saturday.

We cannot ignore that our Achilles’ heel in the international discussion at the WTO is sugar, Farm Commissioner Fischler told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of an international agriculture forum.

The developing countries say this is the product where we don’t accept any more that the Europeans are exporting millions of tonnes and give export subsidies that are double the international sugar price, he added.

They feel this is a dumping operation, so we have to be careful here, Fischler said at the forum, organised by Italian farmers’ group Coldiretti.

There is also the question: will (European) society support such huge prices, and the fact that our internal prices are three times the international price.

Fischler said these concerns made it essential to shake up the EU’s sugar regime and had led to the Commission’s three reform options for sugar — to extend the current regime when it expires in June 2006, open it up completely, or apply cuts to minimum prices with a phased abolition of national production quotas.

He said under all the possible options, sugar production in Europe would continue.

Italian growers said this week that reform of the EU’s sugar sector could threaten the survival of beet sugar farming in Italy, the EU’s third biggest producer after France and Germany.

The option for full liberalisation of the EU’s sugar regime would end centuries-old beet farming in Italy, with the potential loss of thousands of jobs, by opening up the gates to cheaper imports from outside the bloc, such as from Brazil, officials of the Italian Sugar Beet Association (ANB) said.

Fischler said it was not the right time for the European Commission to identify which of the three options for the sugar regime it preferred.

We will say what our preferred option is when we have all the reactions from the stakeholders (member states), he said.—Reuters