A few months ago Isidore Santamaria went out into his picturesque vineyard in southwestern France and ripped row upon row of neatly cultivated vines out of the ground.

“It’s the worst thing for someone who has planted vines, tended them, watered them, watched them grow and looked after them,” he said of the farmland, some of which has been in his family for four generations.

“It’s almost like losing a child.”

Now Mr. Santamaria is contemplating something worse: uprooting his entire holding of 30 hectares, or 75 acres, within sight of France’s mountainous border with Spain.

Confronted by plummeting prices due to overproduction and competition from well-marketed and moderately priced New World wines, the European Union wants farmers to destroy 200,000 hectares of vines, out of a total of 3.6 million hectares across Europe.

The idea is to reduce the supply of locally produced, low-quality table wine, and in that way drain Europe’s “wine lake” of surplus stock before subsidies are slashed and the industry is exposed to the chill winds of a free, or at least a freer, market.

The European Union aims to equip its winegrowers, mainly in France, Italy and Spain, to compete with rivals from Australia, the United States and Latin America. But to many small growers and their allies, it is nothing short of a declaration of war, a vivid example of the worst fears of globalization.

The French agriculture minister, Michel Barnier, has described parts of the proposal as “madness” and promises to oppose it. Protests have arisen, ranging from marches and demonstrations to unspecific but ominous threats from a group of militants to take further action if the price of wine does not rise.

The threat, made by men wearing balaclavas over their faces and broadcast on television news in July, came from a group that has a history of planting small bombs at public buildings and at one winery.

Mr. Santamaria’s plight illustrates why feelings are running so high. The European Commission, the European Union’s executive body, estimates wine prices fell by more than a quarter from 2004 to 2006. Mr. Santamaria believes this drop, as well as a reduction in the amount he produces, has cut his income in half, forcing him to tend the land as an act of charity.

“It’s a catastrophe,” he said. “Show me an industry — say, a carmaker — where the revenue has been cut in half. What happens? It’s the end.”

“I work and I manage to pay the bills, but nothing more. For a year and a half I have worked for nothing. My wife works as a teacher — that’s how I eat.”

The commission predicts that without action, things will become worse: its economic study argues that without change, agricultural revenues in Languedoc-Roussillon, one of the world’s largest wine-producing regions, could fall by 38 percent in two years. Other regions being affected are Abruzzo in Italy and Castilla-La Mancha in Spain, both big producers of table wine.

The wine surplus for the entire European Union could hit 24.8 million hectoliters, or 655 million gallons — 13.9 percent of total production — by 2011-2012 (the market year for wine runs September to September).

The commission wants to spend more than 1 billion euros, or $1.4 billion, from 2008 to 2013 essentially paying farmers to get out of winemaking. Under plans being discussed, the farmers might be eligible for agricultural subsidies for tending their land, but the European Union would end its current financial support for distillation. This pays farmers to rid themselves of excess production by turning it into alcohol either for spirits or, when prices hit rock bottom, for industrial use.

Then, beginning in 2014, the European Union would sweep away the current controls on how many vines can be planted. In theory, this would allow the market to take over: successful vintners would plant more and operations of greater scale would develop, allowing European winemakers to compete on price with their overseas rivals.

The European Union says that the changes would also help it at the World Trade Organization, where its wine subsidies are under attack.

But in France, Europe’s most fervent defender of agricultural handouts and a country where wine is seen as a part of national identity, the notion of ripping up vines, abandoning traditional holdings and producing “industrial” wine is sacrilegious. Critics of the plan, from farmers to politicians, fear that France will reduce its output, only to find that other nations fail to follow suit.

They also note that the rocky, arid land in winegrowing regions provides farmers with few alternatives to wine production, and that the demise of vineyards could devastate the economy, killing off whole communities.

Surveying a field where farmers are actually planting rather than ripping up vines, Roger Torreilles, president of the wine producer Cave des Vignerons in Baixas, near Perpignan, said that they had no other option but to grow vines. He believes the sector deserves special treatment and calls for a bigger European budget for promotion.

The laws of capitalism are, he argued, “not adapted to wine because behind wine there is history and tradition,” and because vines take years to develop, have a life span of decades and do not provide the quick returns required by the market.

Mr. Santamaria, 59, shares that sentiment. But with the European Union proposing to pay 7,000 euros per hectare in the first year of its program to grub up vines, he would at least be able to recoup some of the cash he spent on the farm.

“I haven’t decided,” he said, touring the vineyard in his battered car and pointing to a barren field that was once covered in rows of vines.

An 80-minute drive north of Mr. Santamaria’s vineyard, near Béziers in Languedoc, lies the small but elegant chateau that is home to Domaine de la Baume, bought in 1990 by the Australian wine producer Hardys, part of Constellation Brands and sold in 2003 to one of France’s few large-scale producers of table wine, Les Grands Chais de France.

To purists in France this is the incarnation of the enemy: industrialized wine production. It was here, in 2005, that the same militant group now threatening action set off a small bomb, blowing off one of the cellar doors.

La Baume has bypassed some of the French labeling rules that leave consumers baffled, ignoring the bewildering Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée system, which guarantees the provenance of wines, and markets aggressively to foreign tastes.

Inside the winery complex, in a large, modern, glass-fronted meeting room overlooking the surrounding vineyard, Frédéric Glangetas, director of La Baume, smiles as he utters a sentence many of his countrymen would consider pure heresy: “The trade in wine is like the trade in Coca-Cola or in washing powder.”