Index based crop insurance in senegal and west africa: some concerns based on on-going experiments
Agricultural insurance is just starting in West Africa (WA) with the recent launching of some index based insurance pilot projects. However it is already possible to stress some important issues based on those experiments and also considering previous knowledge on climate and agriculture in WA. As regards climate issues, the main problem is the basis risk due to the huge spatio-temporal variability of rainfall. This reality pleads for the development of remote sensing methods. Other important issues are the local rainfall gradients and the recent trend of increasing rainfall. Climatic issues also stress the question of the fair management of level of protection and cost of premium. The only way to ensure equity between farmers is to use subsidies of different values in order to provide the same protection for the same price to all farmers. That is the case in Senegal but it is the only country where Government provides subsidies for insurance. But the main issue to be solved will be to find an acceptable solution with all the stakeholders to the trade-off between "protection" and "premium cost". While people in Mali and Burkina Faso have accepted so far to buy very cheap insurance policies, without knowing how they protect them, we faced a totally opposite situation in Senegal where farmers' organizations analysed the indices in detail and asked for good protection at a low price. Major efforts will be necessary everywhere to allow stakeholders to analyse insurance issues together and decide which kind of system will be more appropriate.
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| Format: | conference_item biblioteca |
| Language: | eng |
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s.n.
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| Subjects: | E20 - Organisation, administration et gestion des entreprises ou exploitations agricoles, P40 - Météorologie et climatologie, |
| Online Access: | http://agritrop.cirad.fr/567081/ http://agritrop.cirad.fr/567081/1/document_567081.pdf |
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