In Africa, Climate Resilience Through Insurance - NYTimes.com

Tina Rosenberg has an interesting piece on a form of micro-insurance for Ethiopian farmers in Fixes, a category of the Opinionator blog examining creative solutions to social problems.

Essentially, the program does for one of the world?s toughest farming regions what crop insurance has long done for farmers in the parts of the Midwest who are seeing their fields inundated this spring but ? like Michael Beam of Kentucky on NPR yesterday ? say they?re doing O.K. (In his case, Beam said, corn prices are high enough that he won?t even need the insurance.)

Rosenberg?s piece explains that the program, being run by Oxfam America in Ethiopia, offers farmers insurance in return for work that helps build their capacity to withstand too little rain.

Here?s the nut:

David Satterthwaite, Oxfam America?s senior global microinsurance officer, said that Oxfam staff spent months talking to farmers in Tigray about insurance, explaining what it was.??The suggestion was made by a farmer:? ?This is something I would be quite interested in if I could pay for it with my labor, the same way I can pay for food in the safety net.? ?

Not many insurance companies, of course, deal in barter.?A third party was needed to turn people?s labor into money.?Oxfam decided to be that party. It began a program called Harita (Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaptation) in Tigray that included insurance as part of a larger climate change-adjustment program, which includes access to credit, help with savings and programs to increase crop yields.?The groups working on it include the W.F.P. [World Food Program], the Rockefeller Foundation, local insurers and global re-insurers, local microbanks that lend to farmers and some of Tigray?s highly respected community organizations; Oxfam is the equivalent of a general contractor.

The program uses the W.F.P. work-for-food safety net, but adds insurance to the mix.?? Farmers can buy microinsurance with work on forestry, soil management and irrigation projects after their harvest is over.? In return for that work they get insurance that will pay when the rain fails; Oxfam, with financial help from its partners, is currently picking up the bill. (In the United States, crop insurance for farmers is highly subsidized by the government.)

It?s all totally sensible. My only problem with the program is that it?s pitched by Oxfam around the need for adaptation to human-driven climate change, instead of the utterly clear and longstanding reality that this region of Africa has long been, and remains, hugely vulnerable to existing patterns of climate extremes and is going to see roughly doubled risk simply through population growth in coming decades.

Greenhouse heating adds another element of risk, for sure. But this program would, and does, make sense with or without that element.

Any contribution to food problems in this part of Africa from human-driven warming remains impossible to gauge because of parallel drivers of risk and a truly awesome history of natural extremes in climate ? dry and wet.

What sub-Saharan Africa desperately needs is not adaptation to climate change. That implies far too much knowability about current and projected changes in such regions. It needs resilience to climate extremes, whatever the mix of causes, fostered with every possible tool, from economic development and education for girls to family planning to urban opportunity to fertilizer to insurance.

Source: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/in-africa-climate-resilience-through-insurance/

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