FRANCO-GERMAN PARLEY FAILS TO UNBLOCK FARM TALKS
  A specially convened Franco-German
  meeting in the sidelines of a summit of EC leaders failed to
  make any progress over a 1987-88 farm price package that has
  deeply split the two former EC allies, diplomats said
      The meeting was attended by farm ministers and foreign
  ministers from both countries and by French President Francois
  Mitterand, his Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, and by Chancellor
  Helmut Kohl of West Germany.
      The stalemate over farm prices is seen as a key to
  providing a solution to a long-term settlement of the
  Community's worst-ever budget crisis.
      "The Germans clearly do not want to budge," an aide to Chirac
  told reporters. He added the French Prime Minister was visibly
  angered as he the hour-long meeting.
      Bonn and Paris are diametrically opposed to a proposal for
  the Brussels Executive Commission to overhaul radically the
  EC's complex "green" currrency system, designed to translate
  common EC farm prices into national currencies.
      Paris also supports a move for an oils and fats tax which
  West Germany is against, along with Britain, Denmark and the
  Netherlands.
      EC farm minsters are due to resume negotiations on the
  package, which should have been agreed by an April 1 deadline
  tomorrow.
      Diplomats said it had been hoped that the summit could have
  injected fresh impetus into those talks.
      The Commission proposed its package to save one billion
  dollars on the EC's ever-rising farm budget.
      The summit has been dominated by lengthy talks on moves to
  alter the entire system of financing the 12-nation group, and
  plugging a 5.7 billion dollar budget shortfall for 1987.
  

