BRUSSELS -- The European Union dismissed on Monday criticism by a British minister who branded EU foreign aid programs ineffective and "an embarrassment".

Britain's International Development Secretary Clare Short wrote in Monday's edition of *****The Guardian***** newspaper that Britain could reclaim its contribution to the EU's aid funds unless they started to tackle poverty more effectively.

She called the European Commission, the EU's executive body, "the worst offender for highly ineffective aid spending".

The commission said her criticism was unjustified.

"I don't know where she gets that from," Michael Curtis, the commission's foreign aid spokesman, said.

He noted that the EU had recently won praise from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for its foreign aid program, which is the world's biggest.

Short said EU Aid and Development Commissioner Poul Nielson and Foreign Relations Commissioner Chris Patten had started tackling what she described as the inefficiency of the EU's aid.

Curtis said plans to simplify bureaucratic rules governing the budget later this year would help to speed up the distribution of aid, but it was down to politicians from the EU's member states, including Britain, to make reform happen.

"Reform takes time. No one's holding it up," he said.

Short said the EU should make poverty reduction the overriding objective, focus on work where it could add value and streamline the way it carried out its work.

She said aid should be diverted away from middle-income countries because it simply propped up the status quo. But Curtis defended the program: "What Clare Short does not seem to appreciate in her article is that where we are working in middle-income countries, such as Colombia...the money is going to the poorer sections of the population."

European Commission Foreign Relations Spokesman Gunnar Wiegand said Short was criticizing a spending framework her own government had helped to put in place.

"That is a recurrent theme we may see more of in a number of member states: development ministers arguing in a different way to their foreign ministers," he said.

One EU diplomat said Short's threat to withdraw Britain's contribution had a hollow ring because countries could not pick and choose which EU projects to fund.