Despite significant efforts made towards greater food security in the last decade, there remain millions of poor people in developing nations who suffer from chronic hunger. Boosting agricultural output is critical to mitigating this enormous development challenge. In recent years index-insurance has emerged as a widely recognized and powerful innovative tool that can help farmers manage financial losses arising from climate change and natural disasters. The World Bank Group’s Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF), a multi-donor trust fund established in 2009, supports the development and...

According to The Climate Corporation – a tech company based in San Francisco -- data science has the potential to fundamentally improve the productivity and sustainability of global agriculture. Since 2007, the Climate Corporation has been hard at work building a technology platform that combines hyper-local weather monitoring, agronomic data modeling, and high-resolution weather simulations that are updated hourly. On the platform (see www.climate.com ), Climate has built products to protect farmers with index-based insurance and improve profits with software that help farmers make more...

Collier argues that index insurance is best suited to cover disasters which occur every 20 years or greater because severe risks lower premium costs. Below are excerpts form the interview. Q: You have done substantial research, notably with Jerry Skees on index insurance. Why do you think that index insurance needs to be designed as “disaster insurance” rather than “crop insurance”? A: We need a new frame of reference for household markets. Up to now, the consensus focus has been crop yields. Yet the effects of bad weather on household well-being are often multifaceted and poorly captured by...

Farmers know that there will be years when the crop yields are reduced, or prices will be low. Perhaps they will diversify their crops, depend on livestock, or purchase a system to irrigate their crops. All these are ways to mitigate and reduce their risks. When there is no insurance culture or trust in insurance companies -and insurance companies themselves may not have extensive experience selling agricultural insurance - there is understandably little interest to purchase crop insurance. In such cases, it is the government who is the de facto insurer because crop losses of more than 50...