Prospects of Weather Index-Based Crop Insurance in Bangladesh

Md Tareq Hasan

doi:10.11648/j.ijae.20190401.15

Abstract

Agricultural sectors of Bangladesh are frequently affected by natural disasters such as droughts, excessive rainfall, floods, flashflood, heavy fog, earthquakes, storm, cyclones, salinity and landslides. Agriculture or crop insurance is an important method by which farmers can stabilize their income and investment against disastrous effect of losses for natural hazards or low market price of the crops. Crop insurance helps the farmers of developing and under developed countries to initiate production activities after a bad agricultural period. At first, Green Delta Insurance Company has started Weather Index Insurance since 2015 by supporting of World Bank group in Bangladesh. Later on, Sadharan Bima Corporation (SBC) also proposed another new project named ‘Weather Index-Based Crop Insurance (WIBCI)’. Agriculture or crop insurance should be based on risk management strategy. The purpose of this study is to implement and further possibility of weather index-based crop insurance in Bangladesh and descriptive method is used to represent the information. The possible result of this study is continuous crops production activities of the farmers after a natural disaster. Bangladesh should have started agriculture or crop insurance system earlier for better output from agricultural sectors.

Highlights

Agriculture is the largest employment sector in Bangladesh and most of the people earn their living from this sector
2,86,95,763 families are involved with agriculture and total cultivable land is 85,60,964.75 hectares where irrigation or rice is being produced about in 74,06,822.87 hectares
Researcher finds in this study that weather index-based crop insurance is prospecting issue for developing and continuing agricultural production of Bangladesh

Summary

Introduction

Agriculture is the largest employment sector in Bangladesh and most of the people earn their living from this sector. 2,86,95,763 families are involved with agriculture and total cultivable land is 85,60,964.75 hectares where irrigation or rice is being produced about in 74,06,822.87 hectares. Bangladesh is the fourth largest rice producing country in the world. According to information of Ministry of Agriculture, total 34.7101 million metric ton rice was produced in FY 2016-2017 where wheat production was only 1.348 million metric ton and maize was 2.759 million metric ton. Including all kinds of cultivation Bangladesh has got total 1,52,45,841.93 hectares as cropped area and contribution of agriculture sector to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is 14.75% which remarkable

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