Bill that will give free climate-based crop insurance to farmers pushed
A bill that will stop the distribution of calamity funds to farmers and replace it with free climate-based crop insurance is now in the works.
Senator Cynthia Villar, chairman of Senate committee on agriculture and food, said the Senate is already drafting the final version of Free Index-Based Crop Insurance Act and is now targeting to pass it by year-end.
The bill aims to strengthen the resiliency of small farmers against climate change and extreme weather risks by establishing the regulatory framework and program for a free weather index-based crop insurance.
“We will try to pass this this year,” she added.
Based on the initial version of the law, the government will tap private insurance companies and will pay them to distribute crop insurance to farmers.
A similar measure being pushed by Bohol 3rd District Representative Arthur C. Yap is also currently pending in Congress.
It was in 2016 when Yap, former agriculture secretary, filed House Bill No. 3560 or an “Act mandating the Philippine Crop Insurance Corporation (PCIC) to offer index-based insurance coverage and allowing it to engage in reinsurance.”
Yap also sought P10 billion in additional funding for the PCIC, way above its current budget of P2 billion, to expand the farmers’ crop insurance coverage.
When asked if the Senate will consolidate Yap’s measure with hers, Villar said “we will go to bicam if there’s conflict”.
However, she also mentioned that she is not keen about Yap’s proposal to increase the budget of PCIC.
“We like this [Senate version] because the money will be coming from our fund for calamity and instead of just giving it out, we will distribute climate-based crop insurance and just pay premium to insurance companies,” she further said.
Moving forward, Villar said she ordered interested insurance companies, which she refused to identify, to compute how much budget should be allocated for this program.
A United Nations report earlier identified the Philippines as the third most-at-risk from climate change in the world, ranked behind the South Pacific island nations of Vanuatu and Tonga.
In another report, released by environmental organization German Watch — the Global Climate Risk Index 2015, which lists countries most affected by weather-related disasters, like storms, floods and heat waves based on events of 2013 — the Philippines was ranked as No. 1, followed by Cambodia and India.
“As an agricultural country, the Philippines posts tremendous losses from the onslaught of environmental disasters. According to the PCIC, during the period between 1982 and 2012, crop losses brought about by typhoons, floods, droughts, plant diseases and pests reached R7 billion for corn farmers alone,” Villar noted.
She said that damage to agriculture caused by Supertyphoon Yolanda (international code name Haiyan) alone, which hit the country in November 2013, reached over R90 billion (about $2 billion).
The super typhoon damaged about 600,000 hectares of agricultural lands, with an estimated 1.1 million metric tons of crops lost.
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