Over 100 MPs are backing a campaign to transfer billions of pounds from the European Common Agricultural Policy to people in the third world.

In a letter to The Telegraph, 22 former ministers, both Labour and Conservative, call for the £3 billion that currently goes to large farmers in the European Union to be spent on the treatment of Aids in Africa.

The Aids crisis is ''one of the most urgent moral challenges facing the world today,'' they write.

''That money could be most easily and fairly found by cutting the taxpayers' subsidies to Europe's richest farmers.''