A LOCAL confectionery firm once told me it was being forced to cut the ends off its liquorice sticks because European sugar costs three or four times more than world market prices.

This crazy situation is due to the EU sugar regime, which lays down the minimum price for sugar, how much is produced and how we get rid of around five million tonnes of surplus sugar each year. The regime is now up for review -- and not before time.

Artificially high sugar prices are costing us jobs in industries like confectionery. And Europe's taxpayers are having to provide 3.30 euros in subsidies for every one euro worth of surplus EU sugar dumped on world markets.

That's bad news as well for farmers in developing countries. Surplus EU sugar is flooding world markets, forcing down prices and threatening their very survival.

On the face of it, scrapping price guarantees and production quotas would seem to be the answer. But that would mean ending the special access certain developing countries now get to EU markets. Axing that economic lifeline would leave their sugar farmers devastated.

It won't be easy to balance the concerns of EU farmers, who want to keep things the same; our obligations to comply with global trade rules; and the interests of sugar producers in developing countries.

But reform it we must. The status quo is simply no longer an option, if no solution is found, it will be more than the ends of liquorice sticks that will be up for the chop.

GARY TITLEY MEP.