Can policy-based agricultural insurance take bigger strides forward?
Lu Yongfeng
Recently, in Shandong, Liaoning, Shaanxi, Guangxi and other places, some vegetables and fruits have seen “low prices and difficulty selling”, with prices of cabbage, apples, bananas, pears and other varieties falling by 30% to 40% year on year. Farmers' incomes in the relevant areas have dropped sharply, their enthusiasm for production has been dampened, and there have even been cases of apples being fed to chickens and pigs, farmers chopping down fruit trees, and agricultural products rotting in the fields.
As fruit growers, after a whole year of hard work, even a poor harvest feels like a regret, let alone losing everything. When faced with this situation, many fruit growers can only resign themselves to bad luck and feel helpless.
Effectively advancing agricultural modernization has always been the key to increasing farmers' incomes and maintaining rural stability. However, judging from conditions in various places, factors such as “output increases but income does not” and natural disasters still plague the substantial development of agriculture. Fortunately, in recent years some areas have introduced policy-based agricultural insurance. This kind of insurance differs from commercial insurance: government subsidies for premiums are relatively high, and farmers need to invest only three to four yuan per mu. Once crops suffer losses, it can effectively relieve farmers of the worry that disaster may push them back into poverty and leave them unable to resume farming.
However, this new policy-based insurance type is still at the pilot stage. Because the types and methods of agricultural production vary in complexity across places, and local fiscal conditions also differ greatly, the pace of popularizing and implementing policy-based agricultural insurance has consistently been too slow. In addition, policy-based agricultural insurance mainly protects agricultural products related to the national economy and people's livelihood and national food security. Today, besides growing grain, farmers are also keen to grow high-return cash crops. Yet in terms of insurance product design, agricultural insurance focuses on stabilizing grain output, cannot effectively meet the needs of agricultural industrialization diversity, and finds it difficult to effectively protect farmers from losses.
For example, 80% of the farmland in Zhangjiajie, Hunan, is mountainous. Besides growing major grain crops such as rice and rapeseed, farmers are even more keen to grow high-return cash crops such as vegetables, tobacco leaves, citrus, plums, pears and grapes, but none of these have been included in the protection scope of policy-based agricultural insurance.
In addition, a set of sample survey figures shows that nearly 73% of surveyed farmers were prepared to bear the risks of crop farming and livestock breeding themselves, while another 20% of respondents took the attitude of leaving risk to fate. Only 52% of those who had heard of agricultural insurance knew how it operates, while farmers interested in buying agricultural insurance accounted for 7%; under the premise of premium subsidies, those willing to buy agricultural insurance accounted for only about 18% of the surveyed households.
Objectively speaking, policy-based agricultural insurance is another important new policy benefiting farmers after the state reduced and exempted land taxes and implemented direct grain subsidies. In order to better give play to the policy's effectiveness in practical application, we need to work hard in two aspects: first, the policy-based agricultural insurance system itself needs improvement and perfection. As long as an industry is of scale, whether farming, forestry, animal husbandry, side occupations or fishery, policy-based insurance should be popularized as much as possible where it can be popularized, and covered as much as possible where it can be covered, so as to establish a relatively solid barrier against risks. Second, agricultural insurance should be popularized and promoted more quickly to improve the risk resistance of the broad masses of agricultural operators, strive to hold up an umbrella for farmers to shelter them from wind and rain, and serve as a strong backing for the great development of agriculture.