Acceding countries want EU to extend farm support

All six of the front rank of acceding countries want the EU to extend income support to their farmers on a par with their EU counterparts from the date of accession.

The hugely costly demands, which are likely to get short shrift, from the EU are made in formal position papers from the six on the difficult farm chapter of the accession talks which the Commission yesterday confirmed it had received from each of them. A spokesman said they were receiving detailed study before a full response would be given.

The Commission will then prepare over the next three or four months a draft mandate for its negotiators for approval by the member-states. The chapter is likely to be the most difficult in the accession talks.

All six - Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia and Cyprus - also reject the idea of transition periods for full access to the CAP, although some are understood to talk of temporary "exceptions" to common rules.

The EU has been gradually replacing farm price support with direct income support for farmers to allow prices to fall to world market levels.

The direct aid has been seen as compensation for losses in income otherwise incurred.

EU officials insist that there can be no question of making such payments to millions of unviable farmers from the acceding countries, particularly as (with a few exceptions) they have never enjoyed the price or income levels for which EU farmers are being compensated.

The cost of doing so would be up to €6 billion a year, according to one Brussels think-tank, CEPS, and the Agenda 2000 budget for the 2000-2006 period is based on not extending such payments to the acceding farmers but putting substantial cash into modernisation and restructuring .

A spokesman for the Farm Commissioner, Mr Franz Fischler, yesterday insisted that the Commission's position was not just about cash but the reality that income support would act as a disincentive to badly needed reform.

By far the largest problems are faced by the Poles, a quarter of whom still depend on agriculture for their living, and the government paper puts the cost of meeting what it sees as EU minimum requirements at some £5 billion over the next three years.

If it makes such an investment, the paper argues, Polish farmers should benefit in full from CAP, a position backed at home by substantial farmer demonstrations.

But Polish calls for exceptions to be granted to the dairy and meat sectors weaken their case.

In the meat-packing sector, the EU standards are met by only 19 abattoirs and 32 processors, out of several thousand establishments operating around the country.

And the suggestion in the paper that produce not meeting EU standards should be tradable at home or in non-EU third markets is likely to be a complete non-starter for food-safety-conscious EU governments.

In all, based on its distinctly optimistic scenario, the Polish government paper predicts that after the CAP is extended to cover Poland, the incomes of farmers and the food-processing industry will increase annually by the equivalent of 42 per cent to 43 per cent of the sector's gross value-added.