Crop insurance coverage for small farmers is low and declining.
“Increasing agricultural insurance is urgent because of climate change,” says Dr. Gil C. Saguiguit, Jr., Director of the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA). “This is particularly true for small farm holders that constitute about 90 percent of all Filipino farmers.”
SEARCA and the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) are conducting a study on how much meager crop insurance coverage impacts on farmers who grow rice and corn, the country’s two major crops.
SEARCA will focus on corn farmers while PhilRice will zero in on rice farming.
“The poor are more severely affected because they live in areas that are more vulnerable to floods and other disasters and plant crops that are greatly affected by climate change,” he said. “They also have the least access to risk-sharing services such as insurance.”
Agricultural insurance helps insulate income and consumption against shocks and make losses more bearable especially to marginal farmers, he said.
About 3.5 million farmers out of 5.2 million smallholders were covered by the Philippine Crop Insurance Corporation (PCIC) from 1981-2000.
That’s a cumulative figure, according to a study conducted by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS).
The yearly data is a lot more dismal: from about 300,000 farmers with crop insurance in the 1990s, the annual coverage gradually decreased such that in 2006, only 36,000 farmers were written insurance policies.
The SEARCA-PhilRice study – “Improving the Agricultural Insurance Program to Enhance Resilience to Climate Change” – will identify Good Agricultural Practices to complement crop insurance and provide more protection to poor farmers against losses caused by adverse climate, pests and diseases.
Good Agricultural Practices include matured technologies and crop management as well as climate-resilient varieties. [ScienceNewsPhilippines]
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