European Union sugar experts approved a one-off cut of 2.5 million tonnes to national 2006/07 production quotas on Thursday to help erode a huge surplus piled up in intervention stores, officials said.
The initial quota across the 25-member bloc is reduced to about 15 million tonnes from some 17.4 million - a 14 percent reduction. Not every country received the same cuts.
The European sugar manufacturers complained that the move would cost jobs and see a number of sugar factories close earlier than expected.
"The cut was expected but some of the individual cuts were larger than expected and will now see some companies which had been pussyfooting about, finally taking up the (EU) restructuring fund," said Professor Johann De Rycker of CEFS, which represents the sugar manufacturers and refiners in the EU.
As part of the reform announced by the Commission late last year, companies who abolish their quota or close their factory can apply for compensation through this restructuring fund.
Irish farmers were unhappy with their cut of 11.5 percent, reducing their quota by 23,000 tonnes.
"It is sure to have a knock-on effect for processors," a spokeswoman for the Irish farmers association (IFA) said.
"It looks like it could cost the processing industry in Ireland over 3 million euros ($3.58 million) in levies on sugar which they won't actually get."
Farmers had been waiting anxiously for the decision as they plan their crop for 2005, but the IFA says the one-off cut will also have a huge bearing on next year's crop.
This view was echoed in Poland, one of the countries bitterly opposed to this one-off cut, which faces a reduced quota of 11 percent.
"We are afraid that it might be even worse if the EU attempts to cut quotas again in September or October," said Stanislaw Barnas, head of the Polish Sugar Beet Planters Union.
"This is partly because the reform was badly carried out and that is why we are having this surplus," Barnas said.
While cutting quotas was not part of a radical reform deal that EU farm ministers agreed last November, it has emerged as a logical way to prevent more sugar from pouring into intervention stores.
The cut was in line with what EU Agricultural Commissioner Marianne Fischer Boel predicted last month.
"We are of course happy with the result which is necessary for the reform to work," a spokesman for the Commissioner said.
The quota cuts, expressed as a percentage fall from the 2005/06 allocations, are not the same across the board for the bloc's sugar-producing countries.
Criteria included in the quota calculations include the size of a country's B-quota - the smaller production category mainly used for subsidised exports - and the quota volume likely to be sold back to Brussels in year one of the bloc's policy reform.
France and Germany, the EU's biggest producers, received the lions share of the cuts. French farmers received a reduction of just under 500,000 tonnes, while Germany's quota was cut by the largest amount, 555,000 tonnes. Italy received an important reduction of just over 210,000.
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