Xinhua online comment: can the policy-oriented agricultural insurance take a bigger step?

Lu Yongfeng

A few days ago, in Shandong, Liaoning, Shaanxi, Guangxi and other places, some vegetables and fruits were "difficult to sell at low prices." the prices of cabbage, apples, bananas, pears and other varieties dropped 30 to 40 percent compared with the same period last year, and farmers' incomes in relevant areas dropped sharply, and their enthusiasm for production was frustrated. There are even phenomena such as feeding apples to chickens, farmers cutting down fruit trees, agricultural products rotting in the fields, and so on.

As a fruit farmer, after a busy year, a poor harvest feels like a pity, not to mention losing all his money. Faced with this situation, many fruit growers can only admit that they are unlucky and can do nothing about it.

Effectively promoting agricultural modernization has always been the key to increasing farmers' income and rural stability, but judging from the situation in various localities, factors such as "increasing production without increasing income" and natural disasters still hinder the rapid development of agriculture. Fortunately, in recent years, some areas have introduced policy-oriented agricultural insurance, which is different from commercial insurance. The government subsidy is higher in the insurance, and farmers only need to invest three or four yuan per mu. Once crops are lost, it can effectively relieve farmers' worries that they are unable to return to farming because they are unable to return to poverty after the disaster.

However, this new type of policy insurance is still in the pilot stage. Due to the complexity of the types and methods of agricultural production, and the local financial situation is also very different, so the pace of popularizing and implementing agricultural policy insurance has not been big enough. In addition, policy-oriented agricultural insurance is mainly to protect agricultural products related to the national economy and people's livelihood and national food security. Nowadays, in addition to growing grain, farmers are also keen to grow cash crops with high returns. In the insurance design, agricultural insurance focuses on the stability of grain output, which can not effectively meet the needs of agricultural industry diversification, and it is difficult to effectively protect the losses of farmers.

For example, 80% of the farmland in Zhangjiajie, Hunan Province belongs to mountainous areas. in addition to growing major food crops such as rice and rape, farmers are more keen to grow high-yielding cash crops such as vegetables, tobacco, citrus, plums, pears and grapes, but these are not covered by policy-oriented agricultural insurance.

In addition, a group of sample survey figures show that nearly 73% of the surveyed farmers are prepared to bear the risk of planting and aquaculture production, and another 20% of the respondents are resigned to the risk. Knowing how agricultural insurance works accounts for only 52% of those who have heard of it, while 7% of farmers are interested in buying agricultural insurance; and those who are willing to buy agricultural insurance under the premise of premium subsidies account for only 18% of the households surveyed.

Objectively speaking, policy-oriented agricultural insurance is another important new policy to benefit farmers after the reduction of land tax and the implementation of direct grain subsidy. In order to give better play to the effectiveness of the policy in practical application, we need to make efforts in two aspects: first, the policy-oriented agricultural insurance system itself needs to be improved and perfected, as long as large-scale industries, regardless of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, sideline and fishery, can popularize policy insurance as much as possible, cover as much as possible, and establish a relatively solid risk prevention barrier. The second is to popularize and popularize agricultural insurance more quickly, so as to improve the anti-risk ability of the vast number of agricultural operators, strive to provide farmers with an umbrella for shelter from wind and rain, and serve as a strong backing for agricultural development.