James Murray in the Guardian (UK): For more than half a million farmers in rural India the age old fear of crops failing due to bad weather could soon be banished, thanks to an innovative insurance scheme that UN negotiators gathering in Bonn this week are considering as a central component of climate change adaptation measures in Africa, Asia and Latin America.Following a successful trial last month, MicroEnsure, a company specialising in providing insurance to poor communities, plans to launch a scheme next year for up to 600,000 farmers in India's Kolhapur province allowing them to insure against their rice crops failing due to drought or heavy rains during the plants' flowering period.
Chief executive Richard Leftley said micro-insurance policies — so-called because of their relatively low premiums — will be offered to farmers with loans from the local Kolhapur District Cooperative Bank. The firm will then pay out to farmers when weather stations show crops are likely to have been damaged by rain or drought, making it possible for smallholders to support their families and continue loan repayments even when crops fail.
…Leftley is anticipating huge demand from farmers in the region. "We ran a pilot scheme last month for 5,000 farmers and it sold out in two days," he said, adding that after similarly successful trials in Malawi, Ethiopia and the Philippines the company was now looking to prove micro-insurance schemes could work on a large scale…
Fields and farms near Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India, seen from the Yelagiri hills, shot by Arul Prasad, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License
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