EU ministers broadly welcome farm reform ideas

EU agriculture ministers gave a green light on Monday to broad principles for policy reform and drew battlelines over how the lavish farm budget should be spent, in particular on large farms and countryside development.

Last year, European Union Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel unveiled her so-called "health check" of the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), a huge subsidy programme that eats up some 40 percent of the EU's entire annual budget.

Some of the more controversial elements of the plan, in effect a mini-reform, include diverting direct subsidies into projects designed to improve the countryside, and reducing handouts to larger farms according to their income bracket.

While Fischer Boel has yet to publish the details of the proposed health check, they have been circulating in Brussels in draft form -- so her thinking is well known.

EU farm ministers mostly welcomed the principles of many of those reform ideas on Monday and will be presented with Fischer Boel's formal plan at an informal meeting in Slovenia in May.

However, the real debate is only just beginning and no deal is likely until at least November when France, by far the largest beneficiary of CAP spending, will be EU president.