STUTTGART, Germany Germany's Greens, the junior partner in the center-left government, opened a party Congress Friday hoping their success in promoting environment-friendly policies in the wake of the mad cow crisis can help revive their fading popularity ahead of two key state polls, AFP said yesterday.

The Greens, symbolized by former street radical Joschka Fischer who is now foreign minister, have come of age politically, their Managing Director Reinhard Buetikofer told a media conference this week ahead of the Congress in the western city of Stuttgart from Friday to Sunday.

Fischer, despite recent publicity about his revolutionary past, is one of the most popular ministers in the Government of Social Democrat (SPD) Gerhard Schroeder and there is now a second Greens minister high in the polls -- Renate Kuenast who handles the agriculture portfolio.

Kuenast took over the ministry in January in a government drive to respond to the mad cow crisis.

She has pledged to increase organic farming to some 20 percent of German production from its current 2.4 percent as part of an overall effort to fight against the excesses of industrial farming that led to the spread of the brain-wasting Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow, disease.

But she, like Fischer with his dream of a European Federation, has pledged to move in a careful way that works with reigning power centers rather than defies them.

"The greens have a new consciousness of themselves, since almost a year," said Buetikofer, referring to realism and moderation in their positions.

The Greens have plummeted in popularity since the last general elections in 1998 and are keenly aware of the need to revive their fortunes.

The next key step for them is to do well in two ballots March 25 in the western states of Baden-Wuerttemberg, of which Stuttgart is the capital, and in Rhineland-Palatinate to elect regional parliaments. Parties have also begun looking to the next national elections, in 2002.

The Greens leadership said in a press statement distributed Wednesday that their achievement has been to give the government "an ecological and social" slant, despite their inability to get everything they want under Schroeder.

Radicalism still burns among the Greens rank-and-file, however, and Buetikofer said the Congress will be aiming to resolve differences over how militant the Greens stances should be.

A key issue will be the transport of nuclear wastes, with Greens Environment Minister Juergen Trittin urging his party not to take part in protests against convoys.

Such demonstrations have in the past been violent in Germany, with thousands of police mobilized to control militant environmental protestors led by the Greens.

Trittin said in a letter to party members made public in January, shortly after the center-left SPD-Green government approved the transports, that judicial and political conditions were right for nuclear waste to be transported from a retreatment center in France to the German stocking center in Gorleben in the north of the country.

Another dispute is over so-called ecologist taxes on fuel, which the Greens want to increase and which Schroeder refuses as being against his policy of reducing taxes.

The Greens are also to propose in Stuttgart a radical overhaul of the country's tax system, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported in Munich Friday.

The newspaper said the Greens would call for the tax system to be streamlined from top to bottom and reweighted so the affluent would pay more.