The EU farm chief made concessions to win over EU governments today as talks opened to overhaul a sugar policy that angers producers outside Europe but on which much of EU sugar production relies.
Under fire for years for its inflated prices and subsidised exports, sugar is the last major farm sector in the European Union to undergo serious reform. It was not included in the last farm shake-up that took three weeks to negotiate back in 2003.
Seeking to win over a large number of sceptical EU states, EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said it would be disastrous for the EU to delay reform, especially with World Trade Organization pressure to alter policy as soon as possible.
Brazil and other sugar producers outside the EU have argued that the vast subsidies the EU pays for its domestic sugar not only make EU domestic sugar prices among the highest in the world but also distort prices on the world market.
In an opening gambit to kick off the marathon talks, Ms Fischer Boel offered to spread a proposed 39-per cent net cut to minimum support prices over four years, not two, starting in July 2007.
The cut in the support price is seen as a possible death knell for sugar production in some EU countries, among them Italy and Ireland.
"I think I can say with some confidence that we have a compromise which, while responsive to needs, retains the balance and robust architecture of the Commission's first proposal," Ms Fischer Boel told EU farm ministers at the start of the meeting.
Compensation for sugar operations hit with lower revenues and wishing to leave the sector would be raised from the second through to the fourth years of the reform. These operations would sell their quotas, or part of them, back to Brussels.