WITH the European Commission pressing ahead for reform in the sugar industry, farmers are becoming increasingly worried about the future.

As plans stand, reform would mean a drastic 33 per cent price cut and a 2.8 million-tonne quota reduction across Europe by 2007 which would dramatically affect growers in Herefordshire and Shropshire, the main producing counties in the West Midlands.

"It is a very worrying situation," said Nigel Roper of Pencraig, Ross-on-Wye, who is a member of the NFU headquarters sugar beet committee.

"If things do not work out favourably for our growers, sugar beet as we know it could become a crop of the past."

Mr Roper said the NFU was carrying out considerable lobbying of MEPs and talking to the European farm commissioner to make them fully aware of the British position.

"If the cuts are too great and prices drop too low it will not only hit us but have the effect of destroying the growers in the less-favoured countries that the reform is actually trying to help."

Mr Roper said the EC farm commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel, a sugar beet grower's wife, was due to outline her proposals in June.

"We are hoping our growers will get compensation. Apparently, compensation is going direct to French growers but it is understood that it is not going specifically to beet growers in this country and this will put us under a severe disadvantage.

Mr Roper said the British Sugar factory at Alscott had 616 contracts with growers in the West Midlands where farmers produced 778,000 tonnes of beet from some 15,000 hectares.

A spokesman for British Sugar said that if the present proposals went through they would be bound to hit the industry. But at present it was not known how the company or its six factories would be affected.

Richard Barker, head of EU policy and agriculture at Barker Gotelee Solicitors, said that while it was not too late to lobby the Commission and European politicians, it was certainly not too early for growers who wished to continue with beet to talk to each other about co-operating to increase efficiency, and to British Sugar about increasing their acreage.

Mr Barker said the World Trade Organisation's agreement on 'everything but arms' allowed the least-developed countries unlimited access to the EU sugar market.

The European farm commissioner, he said, had sounded a conciliatory note on the European Parliament's criticism of the Commission's proposals to permit cross-border transfers of sugar quotas.