Agricultural insurance escorts the development of new-type agricultural business entities
It is undeniable that China's agricultural production has not yet completely escaped the predicament of “relying on the weather,” with abnormal weather occurring frequently and the impact of disasters expanding day by day. Under such circumstances, how to minimize the losses to individual farmers' interests while ensuring the smooth realization of the national strategy for food security is a major issue.
New-type agricultural business entities, which gather numerous individual farmers, use technological innovation and economies of scale to avoid the repeated shocks of market turbulence, and have contributed to the nation's food security, quality safety and the transformation of agricultural production methods. As they continue to develop, various risk factors they face become intertwined, making the potential and actual demand for agricultural insurance increasingly urgent. At this point, preferential policy support becomes particularly important. Policy-based agricultural insurance, with benefiting farmers as its original purpose, must not aim for profit in the design of insurance products, but should instead give more consideration to how to benefit farmers and how to make claims settlement more humane. For example, with differentiated fiscal subsidy policies, subsidy standards can be raised according to the size of different new-type agricultural business entities. In Haikou, for instance, the premium subsidy for melon and vegetable greenhouse insurance has been raised to 80%. Hefei recently also issued the "Implementation Measures for the Pilot Work of Raising the Coverage Standard of Policy-Based Agricultural Insurance for Rice" targeting large rice growers, family farms and agricultural cooperatives with a planting area of more than 100 mu; the rice insurance coverage has been raised from the conventional 330 yuan/mu to 500 yuan/mu, with the premium of 5.1 yuan/mu borne by the farmers and the rest paid by fiscal funds. This means that once an insured event occurs, farmers will receive up to 51.5% more in insurance claims than before on the original basis. These pro-farmer measures have enabled more new-type agricultural business entities to benefit from agricultural insurance. Another example is how to make insurance services more humane: insurance institutions can proactively provide door-to-door services, shorten the claims review cycle, and provide free market, technology, meteorological and disaster information as well as disaster prevention and mitigation services to new-type agricultural business entities such as specialized cooperatives and family farms. When these services keep up, the pace of agricultural insurance development will naturally accelerate, and its function of escorting new-type agricultural business entities will also improve.