Picture-based crop insurance could make its debut in Kenya next year after a study in India found that it may avoid the pitfalls of other insurance schemes.
Picture-based crop insurance could make its debut in Kenya next year after a study in India found that it may avoid the pitfalls of other insurance schemes.
As trained smallholders photograph their crops during the growing season and dispatch the pictures for expert analysis, the approach could cut costs by reducing the number of field visits by loss assessors.
Insurance could insulate farmers in low- and middle-income countries against regular crop catastrophes and give them the security to invest and experiment. But the costs of processing large numbers of tiny farms, and the high frequency of crop failure have thwarted the success of traditional insurance, said Francisco Ceballos, an associate research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington DC, United States.
Over the last 20 years, a cheaper version known as index-based insurance, which pays out en masse when triggered by adverse weather, for instance, has often been unpopular amongst farmers, he added. This is because smallholders may get no payout if their crops fail for other reasons such as pests and because the weather may be measured at stations at some distance from the farm and not provide an accurate picture of what an individual farm experienced.
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