The EU has strict rules about aid doled out by its 25 member states to particular industries and companies, designed to ensure governments grant assistance that does not give one sector in a particular country an unfair trade advantage.

Normally, the Commission must first approve requests from any EU government that wishes to grant aid. In cases of state aid to compensate farmers for bad weather and disease, this prior permission from Brussels would no longer be required.

In the last few years, the Commission has found itself fielding requests to approve compensation in cases of fire, drought and flood, where both animals and crops have been lost.

The requests usually take the form of advance subsidy payments, or exemptions to use land that would normally be kept fallow to give crops a chance to recover between seasons.

The Commission uses a series of complex criteria to decide whether a country may grant aid, meaning that farmers who urgently need financial help can suffer lengthy delays and a great deal of bureaucracy.

But in its proposals to relax some of the EU state aid rules on agriculture, the Commission has also attached some strings.

From 2010, for example, farmers would have to be insured against a particular crisis scenario - to the tune of half their annual production - before they could request cash from a national government without involving permission from Brussels.

"Exempting from prior authorisation state aid for the effects of bad weather and animal and plant disease would greatly accelerate payment to farmers in situations of real need," EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said.

"We want to encourage farmers to take up bad weather insurance and improve water management - two components of good risk management," she said in a statement.