EU BUDGET commissioner Dalia Grybauskaite has blamed the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for fostering protectionism and forcing EU consumers to pay too much for food.
She has also called for reform of the CAP at the start of an EU budget review, which will pit farming states such as Ireland and France against Britain, Sweden and Germany.
"In reality our CAP today is a more protectionist policy than a market-oriented policy and, because of this, we pay, all of us, all consumers, two to three times more for food than we would pay without this policy," said Ms Grybauskaite, who will present a formal commission proposal outlining how the EU budget should be reformed next year.
The CAP, she said, was the only EU policy to fail a series of academic studies recently commissioned by her department to determine whether they added value for EU citizens.
The policy presented real issues in terms of fairness, quality and size when it came to evaluating the EU budget. For example, the 12 new member states that have joined the union since 2004 must co-finance some payments to their farmers, while the Irish, French and the 15 other EU governments benefit from direct EU payments.
She also denied that the CAP supported small farmers. "Three- quarters of the beneficiaries in the EU15 receive less than €5,000 a year or just 14 per cent of budget. The rest goes to very large farms or industries," she said.
"Agricultural output or input gives about 5-7 per cent of GDP in each member state and we pay 40 per cent out of the EU budget. Is it proportional?" Ms Grybauskaite asked.
The EU budget is financed by member states, which pay about €130 billion a year into a common pot to finance the union's activities and policies.
Payments to farmers and other agricultural programmes take up about 40 per cent of the budget - a policy that is strongly opposed in several member states, such as Britain and Sweden.
Britain argues that the EU should focus more of its spending on innovation and knowledge-based activities rather than on supporting the agricultural sector.