Reforming farming to improve food quality will add only slightly to prices in the shops, the EU Agriculture Commissioner, Mr Franz Fischler, said yesterday.
The Commissioner maintained, however, that consumers were increasingly willing to pay higher prices to ensure their food was safe.
Mr Fischler said some trends in intensive farming should be reversed, and agriculture brought closer to nature.
"It is time we corrected certain mistakes from the past. About 20 years ago, we started feeding meat-and-bone meal to ruminants and thus turning herbivores into carnivores. But that's over now, thank God," Mr Fischler told the German newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel.
The Commissioner said Agenda 2000, the EU agreement that set out agriculture spending until 2006, allows member-states to promote environmentally friendly production. It would not be necessary to renegotiate the agreement, he said, to shift subsidies towards food producers who observed the highest standards.
Agenda 2000 is due to be reviewed next year and Mr Fischler hopes to use the review to combat weaknesses in food production quality. He believes any reform of agriculture must put the interests of the consumer first but he acknowledged that better quality would mean higher prices.
"There are more and more consumers who pay attention to price but also place great value on quality. In Germany right now, only about 12 or 13 per cent of the average household income goes on food. It doesn't make much difference to private households whether they spend 13 or 14 per cent on food but it does make a difference to the agricultural system." Mr Fischler's remarks came as his native Austria said it had found its first case of BSE in a seven-year-old cow in the province of Tyrol. The animal tested positive after it was slaughtered in Germany. Italy found its first case of BSE since 1994 at a farm in Lombardy on Saturday. The country's Agriculture Minister warned that, as the testing programme ordered by the EU progressed, further cases could be discovered.
