EU regulators may have to find new food sources for a 20-year scheme that feeds millions of Europe's poor after radical policy changes put an end to the notorious grain mountains and milk lakes of the 1980s and 1990s.

The Commission has opened an internet consultation that will run until mid-May, to ask charities, national government experts, non-governmental organisations and any interested EU citizens for their views on how the scheme should proceed.

The food aid scheme was set up during Europe's exceptionally cold winter of 1986 when surplus stocks of food commodities were given to national charities to distribute to needy people. Now, after a series of policy changes, those stocks are mostly gone.

Before the EU's mammoth reform of its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 2003, public stocks of cereals, beef, butter, milk powder, olive oil, rice and sugar were usually plentiful and stored in warehouses around Europe at taxpayers' expense. But those large surplus stocks, for which the EU was heavily criticised by its trading partners for exporting with subsidies, are now mostly non-existent, with the exception of sugar.