Three times as many French farmers receive large subsidies from the EU than those of any other country. In total, France receives almost twice as much direct subsidies for its farmers as any other member state, and they are mostly channelled to large farmers rather than traditional small-scale land holders.

Despite the huge discrepancies France steadfastly refuses to countenance any reduction in farm subsidies, bringing the EU budget negotiations in Brussels and the World Trade Organisation talks in Hong Kong, both climaxing this week, to the brink of collapse.

Dominique de Villepin, the French Prime Minister, declared yesterday that France would veto any EU budget agreement at tomorrow’s Brussels summit, or world trade deal, that entailed cutting farm subsidies before the EU’s next seven-year budget ends in 2013. “We will not accept an accord that obliges Europe to start a new reform of the Common Agricultural Policy,” he told the French Parliament.

Neil O’Brien, of the Open Europe think-tank, said: “The world trade talks will fail because the EU won’t budge, the EU won’t budge because France won’t budge, and France won’t budge because its farmers have it over a barrel.”

Claire Godfrey, trade policy officer at Oxfam, said: “This is holding so much up. It is holding the EU budget and the WTO talks to ransom. The intransigence is unbelievable.”

The European Commission figures show why French farmers are so attached to the EU subsidies. More than 131,000 French farmers took €20,000 (£13,000) or more from Brussels in 2003, far more than the combined total of 104,000 farmers from Britain, Italy and Germany who receive that amount. About 3,200 French farmers secured more than €100,000 in subsidies. The biggest beneficiary in France was a rice farmer in the Camargue , who received €866,290.

In total, French farmers received €7.38 billion in subsidies in 2003, more than twice the total of the UK, Italy or Germany. The EU subsidies are highly skewed in favour of large farmers. In 2003 the richest 1.6 cent of EU farmers received 27 per cent of all subsidies. The poorest 54 per cent of farmers received only 4 per cent.

Gerard Durand, from the farming union Confederation Paysanne, said that smaller farmers were increasingly impatient with a situation where the richest farmers receive the lion’s share of subsidies and 70,000 nothing. “In France there is no transparency about aid because they know that if details of how the money is distributed was published tomorrow nobody would continue to pay for it,” he said.

Chris Davies, the Liberal Democrat leader in the European Parliament, said: “The French have to face up to the reality of the modern world. The CAP is not providing protection for the traditional French farmer in the way seen in the French popular imagination.”

French farmers receive an average of €16,693 per capita, the second highest in the EU, and ten times higher than counties such as Greece, Italy and Portugal, where the Brussels subsidies are focussed on smallholders. Only Britain, which has argued strongly for the abolition of CAP, comes in higher, mainly because of a few large-scale industrial farms.

In Britain, the aristocracy, including the Queen and the Prince of Wales, have done particularly well out of the CAP, but the pattern is repeated elsewhere. Prince Albert of Monaco receives about €300,000 a year from his farms in France.

Many senior French politicians also profit handsomely, according to the French finance magazine Capital, which calculated that Rémy Pointereau, a senator, received €121,000 last year, and Luc Guyau, an ally of President Chirac, received €50,000.

Cees Veerman, the Dutch Agriculture Minister, received €168,000 for farms in France and €22,000 for farms in the Netherlands. In Denmark, four out of 18 Cabinet ministers received money from CAP last year, as did the husband of Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU Farm Commissioner.

In a pamphlet last week, the Centre for European Policy Studies, an EU-funded think-tank, described the phenomenon of politicians receiving money from CAP as a form of legitimate corruption. The author, Richard Baldwin, said that it “helps to explain the CAP’s gravity-defying ability to transfer large sums to large landowners in the name of social solidarity”.

The French Government insisted that the CAP has been undergoing a long series of reforms already, and that the budget for 15 EU countries was now being spread to cover 25. A spokesman said: “We agree on reforming CAP again, but in the future because we need legal and financial stability. Is it fair to change the rules of the game before it has started?”