Vaxjo, Sweden, Sept 15 - Support is growing among European Union member states for a new regulatory set-up for milk farmers struggling with depressed prices, France's agriculture minister said on Tuesday.
Bruno Le Maire said a shake-up of the European Union's dairy market, rather than more handouts, was the answer for producers who last week launched a protest movement in France that is starting to spread to other EU countries.
"Our plan is not to offer more and more money to farmers to try to buy social peace," Le Maire told reporters after a meeting with his European counterparts in southern Sweden.
"Our plan is to try to build on a new market regulation for milk and I think this will be a key issue for the Council and for each of the 27-member states."
Dairy farmers in France are leading a movement that has seen farmers in several countries refuse to deliver milk and instead throw it away or give it out free to the public.
Producers are protesting against a slide in prices over the past year and EU plans to increase annual production quotas, which they say will exacerbate the market fall.
Le Maire said a joint French-German proposal had gained two new backers at Tuesday's meeting, Spain and the Czech Republic, taking the total in favour to 18.
He expected a decision by Poland on Monday when he visits Warsaw.
The French-German draft called both for temporary measures such as an increase in export refunds for butter, milk powder and cheese, and longer-term changes like making EU intervention buying possible all-year round and developing contractual agreements between dairy producers and processors, he said.
Le Maire said he also supported an idea to create a European futures market for butter and milk powder to stabilise the sector in the face of world market fluctuations.
"The European producer should not have to depend on price variations set in New Zealand in a speculative market," he said.
COMMISSION PROPOSALS ON THURSDAY
Le Maire said the European farm chief, Mariann Fischer Boel, had agreed to study the French-German proposal.
But getting the commission on board will be far from easy.
The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, has opposed calls for freezes to quota increases in the run-up to their planned abolition in 2015.
It has already taken a string of measures to shore up dairy markets, such as reinstating export subsidies -- to the anger of some of the EU's major trading partners like the United States.
Fischer Boel, the European Agriculture Commissioner, told a press briefing on Tuesday that the Commission had been working on long- and short-term solutions for dairy that would be presented to parliament on Thursday, but she gave no details.
She kept to her stance that she would not support anything that would roll back the EU's "health check", a mini-reform of EU farm policy agreed to in November last year.
Fischer Boel added that Europe needed to bear in mind that the milk market appeared to be stabilising.
"I'm very happy to see this because I have never underestimated the difficult situation for the dairy farmers," she said.