By Yann Ollivier (AFP) 

LA HULPE, Belgium — The European Union gears up to rethink its controversial farm policy in a few weeks with agriculture ministers bitterly divided Tuesday over the handout of sudsidies.

With deficit-hit member states keen to cut spending ahead of talks on the next post-2013 EU budget, rowing over the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy -- 40 percent, or almost 60 billion euros out of the total budget last year -- looks set to continue.

"It will be a lively fight," said German minister Ilse Aigner on the sidelines of informal talks with his counterparts in this Belgian town.

There is general agreement amid the 27-nation bloc to maintain policies including direct subsidies to farmers and preserving rural regions, said Belgian minister Sabine Laruelle.

The problem, she added, is "there's no consensus on how you calculate subsidies or hand them out."

France and Germany, which along with Spain are the CAP's main beneficiaries, last week made a joint call for a strong farm budget in the November 17 reform talks. French minister Bruno Le Maire said it had rallied "more than 20 of the 27" EU states.

Though Paris and Berlin failed to agree on a constant farm budget for the upcoming 2014-1020 period, the two countries (which last year picked up respectively 10.44 and 7.5 billion euros, with 7.48 for Spain) called for "resources that meet our ambitions."

They also firmly opposed the idea of a fixed rate of subsidies, a proposal put forward by Poland and backed by other east European states who claim older member states are picking up too large a slice of the pie.

The Franco-German line, said Poland's minister Marek Sawicki, "is very conservative, it merely defends the interests of French and German farmers."

"When the French and Germans discuss ?new? criteria for direct payments, they mean a 'slight modification' of the old ones," he added, calling for "more equality."

"There will be no CAP revolution, a revolution being a bad idea," said France's Le Maire.

Once Brussels outlines its reform plans, the European Commission has until July 2011 to throw up concrete proposals.

But also likely to cause further discord is the issue of Britain's "Thatcher" rebate, which returns billions of euros annually to London in place of farm payments to France and Germany.

Asked this month how he intended to fight off a move by the EU to slash the rebate, finance minister George Osborne said: "By making it very clear from the start that we are not going to give way on this at all."

But the issue is expected to return to haunt the last EU summit of the year in mid-December, a British diplomat said.