Amid the bad blood and mutual suspicion created by the recent killing of innocent farmers in Benue and some other states in the country by herdsmen, a soothing and calming balm came from the Federal Government when it recently announced that it was in the process of introducing a new agricultural insurance policy that will henceforth mitigate Nigerian farmers against losses they suffer as a result of the vagaries of weather, bush fires, pests, natural disasters such as floods and drought, and destruction of their farms by herders and their cattle, among other risks.
If well packaged and executed, the new agricultural insurance policy is capable of encouraging more investment in agriculture and in boosting government’s diversification of the economy away from the oil sector into agriculture. Reports said the insurance cover initiative is a collaborative effort of the National Insurance Commission of Nigeria, the Central Bank of Nigeria funded Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending and the operators of the insurance industry within and outside the country.
Managing Director of NIRSAL, Mr. Aliyu A. Abdulhameed, who broke the news at a training programme to sensitise operators of insurance firms on the new index-based agricultural insurance, said farmers who will benefit from the insurance coverage for agricultural primary producers had been increased from 500,000 to 3.8 million in the coming years and that the training was part of efforts to nurture local and international partnerships to train insurance experts in Nigeria that would midwife the farmers insurance policy.
He said that under the agricultural insurance scheme the 3.8 million farmers will be provided with cover to de-risk them against possible natural and man-made unforeseen incidences that would ordinarily deter many from venturing into investment in agriculture.
In the advanced world, farmers take insurance cover against bad weather, pests, bush fires and crop failure, among others. The fact that they are able to take insurance cover enables them to expand their farmlands and if the unforeseen happens, they will be paid by insurance company and they can continue their farming. In Nigeria and other African countries, farmers are on their own. That is why a farmer who subsists on less than $2 per day cannot afford money for agricultural insurance. More than 80 percent of our farmers are peasant farmers. They eke out their living by tilling the land and subsisting on less than $2 a day.
With the new agricultural insurance scheme, hundreds of famers in many parts of the country, especially in areas susceptible to flood such as Kano, Kogi, Niger, Cross River and many other states can overlook their experiences in the past and forge ahead with their agriculture again. The insurance companies would guide them with the weather and when to harvest before the floods come.
Apart from benefiting from information on weather, farmers would be able to plan ahead of such unforeseen circumstances and hedge against them. The new agricultural insurance programme is therefore a step in the right direction. With it, many affluent Nigerians who are interested in large scale agriculture but had stayed away because of the harsh experiences of other farmers and the financial loss that could ensue following flood disasters, pest invasion, wild fires and the like, would now be able to take the insurance cover like their counterparts in the advanced world and venture into large scale farming knowing well that they are covered by the insurance scheme.
Indeed, Nigeria could have achieved food security long time ago if the government had introduced agricultural insurance the way it is doing now. Such lofty programmes as Operation Feed the Nation and Green revolution introduced by the Federal Government many years ago would not have died premature deaths if the government had embraced agricultural insurance the way it is
doing now.
However, all is not lost. If successfully introduced, agricultural insurance has a good chance of boosting the agricultural diversification efforts of the government. It will also enable the country to achieve food security sooner than it envisaged as more firms and individuals will come under the agricultural insurance scheme and venture into large scale
farming.
