Spain backs direct farm subsidies for new EU members joining in 2004

Spain will urge European Union (EU) members to agree to direct payments to farmers in new member states when they join in 2004, the country's Agriculture Minister Miguel Arias said yesterday. Arias said one of Madrid's priorities during its six-month term as EU president, which begins on January 1, would be to conclude talks with the 12 candidate countries on how they will fit in with the EU's system of agricultural subsidies, a particularly thorny issue given their big and mostly very poor farming populations. "It doesn't seem logical to have two-speed agriculture within a single market," Arias said in Lisbon after a meeting with Portuguese Agriculture Minister Luis Capoulas Santos. Opposition among wealthier existing EU members to extending the same system of direct payments to farmers to those in new member states like Poland was diminishing, Arias said, adding that he proposed direct payments for new member states should be scaled up to the full amount over a period of five to 10 years. "They will be increasing payments but from the same base. That, in principle, is the line which the Spanish presidency would support in order to fix a common position," he said. (Reuters)