Europe Bloc Readies Food Aid for Soviets : Assistance: Two days after U.S. program is announced, the EC prepares a $1-Billion plan.

ROME —  The 12 nations of the European Community, seeking to play a role equal to that of the United States on the world stage, rallied Friday around a package of about $1 billion in emergency food aid to the Soviet Union.

The assistance, which is to be formally approved today after some disputed details are ironed out overnight, came two days after President Bush announced that the United States will supply up to $1 billion in loan guarantees to buy U.S. agricultural products.

European leaders said their effort was intended not only to help Soviet citizens survive a winter of food shortages but also to help Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev survive the wrath of hungry Soviet citizens.

“It is not in the interests of Europe . . . that the Soviet Union should lapse into anarchy or that the Soviet Union should fall back into the hands of some backward-looking tyrant,” said British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd.

And an Italian press spokesman quoted German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as telling the other 11 European heads of government, “There are no alternatives to what Gorbachev stands for.”

The leaders also gave tentative approval to a further $1.4 billion next year and the year after to help the Soviets create a market economy and develop their fragile infrastructure.

One element of the Bush Administration proposal, worked out as a compromise with other major industrialized nations, is to give the Soviet Union access to the expertise and advice of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

The United States earlier this year had opposed a French and German proposal to give the Soviet Union membership in the two international financial institutions, with the ability to tap their financial resources. At last June’s economic summit in Houston, U.S. officials had contended that the money would be wasted unless it was accompanied by basic restructuring that would move the Soviets more toward a market economy.

Under the U.S. proposal announced Wednesday, the Soviet Union would have a “special association” with the two institutions that could eventually lead to full membership. It would be able to tap the World Bank for financing of long-term projects and the International Monetary Fund for short-term funding squeezes. Often, however, the IMF requires countries to implement painful austerity measures before it provides the funding.

The issue of Soviet aid dominated the talks in Rome as the leaders of the 12 EC nations met for the first of two days in the imposing, 19th-Century stone building of the Italian Parliament. In other developments:

The European leaders held fast behind U.N. resolutions demanding that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait, which it invaded on Aug. 2. “Iraq will never have anything to fear from the 12 (members of the European Community) if-- if Iraq withdraws and Kuwait regains its sovereignty,” said Pio Mastrobuoni, the spokesman for Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti.

Bush, in a letter sent Thursday to Andreotti, the host of the meetings here, had urged the Europeans “to stand firm and remain united.” Italian Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis pledged that the European Community would work “in parallel with” the United States.

Some European nations, including Britain and the Netherlands, pressed for a conciliatory statement on agricultural trade. Talks aimed at liberalizing all aspects of international trade broke down in Brussels last week over a U.S. demand that Europe dismantle its massive farm subsidies.

But other nations, notably France and Germany, stood firm behind Europe’s offer, rejected by the United States as inadequate, to trim subsidies by 30% over 10 years. Separately, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Clayton K. Yeutter and EC Agriculture Commissioner Ray Mac Sharry met in Brussels but reported no progress on the knotty issue.

British Prime Minister John Major, making his debut on the international stage, established a style 180 degrees from that of his abrasive predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, whose outspoken objections to a common European currency at the last such meetings in October indirectly precipitated her downfall.

“I don’t think anybody in the (European) Community wants a confrontation,” Major told reporters. “. . . We are very clear that we want the United Kingdom to play a central and a positive role in Europe.”

Britain remained the odd country out in Europe’s rush to a single currency sometime late in the 1990s. Major, who as Thatcher’s chancellor of the exchequer had opposed the other nations’ plans for a single currency, urged against such a significant step without a full understanding of the consequences.

“We have to know what it means economically--it is not just a political statement--and that, of course, is why we have proposed an evolutionary approach,” Major said.

Steps toward economic union and toward political union will be at the top of the agenda when the 12 leaders reconvene today.

On the issue of food aid to the Soviet Union, the 12 European leaders were described by Mastrobuoni as “without exception” in accord on the basic elements of a proposal for an immediate $1 billion. The proposal, by EC President Jacques Delors, would allocate one-third of the aid in outright gifts and the other two-thirds in the form of loans.

But Major, Kohl and French President Francois Mitterrand, arguing that the Soviets did not need to be burdened by more debt, urged providing more of the aid in gifts and less in loans.

With Major again in the lead, some of the leaders also said the aid must be accompanied by technical assistance to prop up the ineffective Soviet food distribution system and ensure that the food reached the needy.

Mastrobuoni said Major told the other leaders that “there are racketeers at work,” hoarding food to sell at a profit as people grow desperate.

Times staff writer Karen Tumulty in New York contributed to this article.