LONDON, Aug 20: The European Union’s farm subsidy policy is unfair and only leads to greater inequalities within the enlarged 25-nation bloc, three British scholars said in a major study published on Friday.

In a critical analysis of the Common Agricultural Policy, they endorsed Prime Minister Tony Blair’s call for root-and-branch reform of the scheme that doles out more than 90 billion euros ($109.6 billion) a year.

Tony Blair is right in saying that the CAP money should be redirected to other areas and this needs to begin before 2013, said Mark Shucksmith of the University of Newcastle, one of the book’s authors.

In our book, we are not talking about a sudden change, but a gradual and preferably well-planned move towards measures that will provided a sustainable future for our rural areas.

The book, CAP and The Regions: The Territorial Impact of the Common Agricultural Policy, funded by EU institutions, coincides with Britain’s turn at the rotating EU presidency.

It comes during a lull in a bitter feud between Blair and French President Jacques Chirac over EU farm subsidies that is certain to flare up once Europe is back from summer holidays.

Blair is resisting calls led by Chirac for Britain to give up its EU budget rebate — which compensates for the relative little it takes from the CAP — without a pre-2013 shake-up of the scheme that gobbles up 42 percent of all EU spending.

The authors found that “rich core regions” in Germany, Britain, France and the Netherlands collectively take a bigger slice of the CAP pie than poorer peripheral regions in Spain, Italy, Poland, and southern and eastern Europe.—AFP