Crop insurance products prepared for growers in the Philippines

Crop climate change Insurance

The World Bank’s private sector funding arm is working on new protection for farmers.

The private sector funding branch of the World Bank, The International Finance Corp. (IFC), is currently working with a number of its partners in order to create new crop insurance products that are meant to provide farmers in the Philippines with protection against the considerable losses that they incur from typhoon damages.

It has been estimated that farmers in the country have lost $2.5 billion to damaging weather since 2009.

The IFC reported this statistic, last week. The World Disaster Report from 2012 gave the Philippines the rating of the country that is the third most prone to disaster in the world. The country experiences an average of 20 typhoons every year. For this reason a form of indemnity crop insurance program is being designed so that thousands of rural entrepreneurs and farmers across the country will be able to afford the protection required to cover their livelihood and assets.

Crop InsuranceSeveral partners are now involved in the creation of this affordable crop insurance option.

The announcement from the IFC showed that it was working with the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development Insurance Agency (CARD) as well as Pioneer Insurance and Surety Corp. This will give CARD Insurance and Pioneer Insurance the ability to offer the affordable crop insurance products in the Philippines.

According to Jesse Ang, a representative from the IFC, crop insurance has failed to become popular in the country, until now, because the premiums are cost prohibitive to those who would benefit from it, and the delays in payments have discouraged potential customers from buying. Ang went on to add that “The lack of insurance makes farmers vulnerable to losses from calamities. We hope that our latest initiative will help address this problem.”

The president of Pioneer life, Lorenzo Chan Jr. explained that this crop insurance option will be an important step for assisting farmers in managing the risks from the many perils that they were facing. That coverage will be complemented by index-based protection, which uses a pre-determined index for the benefits payments.

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