By JIMOH BABATUNDE
A World Bank team led by Ramiro Iturrioz has commended the Nigerian Agricultural Insurance Corporation (NAIC)  for  its efforts to sustain the specialised agricultural insurance scheme which provide insurance cover to Nigerian farmers.

Speaking during a technical visit to the Corporation, Iturrioz revealed that Nigeria is the only country whose agricultural insurance scheme is broad based and not specific to a particular crop, but also provides insurance cover on livestock in its service delivery to farmers generally.

He explained that only one-crop insurance cover was successfully provided in about 10 countries like Argentina, India, South-Africa, Australia, Sweden Germany and Malaysia, adding that the Nigerian model of agricultural insurance was a huge success and should therefore be sustained with more subsidy from government.

Iturrioz disclosed that the World Bank was very impressed by NAIC service delivery, especially its pre-inspection farm initiative and also the prompt claims response mechanism in the discharge of the Corporation’s statutory mandate, towards mitigating farm loses, occasioned by floods, drought, pest, fire and other disasters.

He said that given NAIC’s broad based agricultural insurance portfolio, the World Bank was desirous of partnering with the agency towards introducing the Weather-Index Insurance and to complement the traditional crop insurance presently operated by NAIC.

Responding, NAIC Managing Director, Mr. Kwatri kwagga Yusuf, welcomed the idea of partnering with the global agency, but observed that the challenges of the weather index insurance model was both enormous and tasking, given the narrow scope of its coverage on the crop index and also using the unpredictability of the weather especially (floods and drought) as a major factors to mitigate farm losses.

He argued that the World Bank initiative would be less  attractive to the Nigerian farmers whose capacity are very minimal, adding that risks like pests and fire are also critical disasters that the Nigerian farmers contend with annually, which cannot be indexed and therefore outside the weather index perils.

Yusuf further added that the World Bank model would not be easy to sell given its additional burden on the farmers who are to wholly pay for the necessary insurance premiums. He also averred that except there was a centralised premium cover towards safeguarding the bank loans, banks would equally be reluctant to fund the weather-based insurance model.

He therefore called for a synergy between the World Bank and NAIC, with a view to addressing all the grey areas towards arriving at a more workable index insurance models for the benefit of the Nigerian farmers across the Federation.

The World Bank had since last year started technical discussion with a few agriculture related agencies with a view to introducing the weather index insurance using Maize and Rice, for the World Bank pilot scheme in Nigeria.

The team has already conducted a preliminary study across the country and was expected to formulate a seamless framework towards the successful implementation of the weather index insurance in Nigeria.