THAT the EU's Common Agricultural Policy needs reform hardly needs stating. For it is a scandalous and wasteful scheme that systematically plunders the purses of millions of people.

Costing £30 billion a year - half of Brussels' spending - it was originally intended to prevent food shortages. But if anti-European sceptics need a model of EU excess, surely, it is provided by the monster that the CAP has become.

For it means that taxpayers pay farmers to produce too much food that cannot be sold. Then, they then pay again to pile it up in beef, grain and butter mountains and lakes of milk and wine. Often, they pay for food to be destroyed - when, elsewhere in the world, millions go hungry.

We even pay for food not to be grown or produced. And that we buy in the shops is overpriced - as CAP subsidies add £1,000 a year to the food bill of a family of four.

Yet, what happens when farmer ministers are at long last given the task of chopping down this monster and radically reforming the CAP? Again, typical of EU politics, the opposite is achieved.

For as today ministers were hailing cutbacks on farm subsidies and quotas that "when fully implemented" will cut food bills by a £1 billion a year - equal to £70 a year for the family of four - it is disclosed that this supposedly far-reaching overhaul of the system will actually add another £1 billion to the CAP bill.

Why is this? And why instead of real reform, do we have this fudge?

It is, of course, the old story of EU government being emasculated by national interests and ensuing compromises resulting in measures that are blunted and which few are happy with. Indeed, our own government is deeply unhappy with the high cost of these reforms which, characteristic of CAP craziness, spring from increased compensation payments in return for cuts in subsidies. And it may be that this deal turns out to be no deal as it could be overturned by the EU heads of government at their Berlin summit later this month.

Even if it survives, the savings promised may not be delivered to shoppers. Consumers' groups are already warning that this Euro fudge would do little or nothing to reduce food prices in the shops.

The government - already unleashing a probe into "rip-off" prices in Britain, including those in the powerful supermarkets - must use all its strength to prevent any move by retailers to absorb these supposed savings for themselves.

But it is high time that it put some steel into the pathetic attempts by the EU at reform of the crazy and immoral CAP, by threatening the alternative of an effective and sensible farm policy for Britain alone.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.