Event Date
AMA Innovation Lab Brown Bag Lunch Seminar Series
Uninsured risk remains a major hurdle to smallholder farmer investment, productivity growth, and poverty reduction. Index-based agricultural insurance is theoretically an excellent solution. Extensive research indicates however that index insurance take-up has been disappointingly low without large and sustained subsidies. But there is a way forward.
Revised contract designs, advanced technology for better measurement, improved marketing, and better policy support can all improve take up. The key research break-though is that index insurance, when combined with risk-resilient technological innovations and new risk-oriented savings and credit products can offer farmers a flexible tool to cope with shocks, manage risk and ultimately build economic resilience for themselves.
The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Assets and Market Access is hosting this lunchtime seminar to cover lessons learned on agricultural and livestock index insurance pulling from over a decade of USAID-funded research. The presentations will include concrete examples of a new suite of risk-management instruments that, in conjunction with index insurance, will create real development impact.
Highlighted speakers include:
- Michael Carter, AMA Innovation Lab Director, UC Davis Professor of Agricultural Resource Economics
- Alain De Janvry, UC Berkeley Professor of Agricultural & Resource Economics
Discussants:
- Louise Fox, USAID Chief Economist
- Greg Collins, USAID Center for Resilience Director