The Soil Association does not want the UK to follow in the footsteps of the US and Canada, and has looked at the demerits of crop insurance ahead of the Agriculture Bill.
Last year, at the launch of Farmers For Britain, Farming Minister George Eustice said: “I want us to explore the potential for government-backed insurance schemes like they have in Canada and futures markets like they have in the US to help mitigate risk.” This was also posted on his website as part of the vision for a new UK agriculture policy.
Now the membership charity – which campaigns for healthy, humane, and sustainable food, farming, and land use – is saying these North American crop insurance programmes are not good for the environment, based on multiple studies it has gathered from the two markets.
According to a Farmers Guardian report, the Soil Association found that not only are the crop insurance programmes detrimental to the environment, they also cost taxpayers.
“Hefty taxpayer subsidies pay about 60% of the premiums, all the costs of administering the programme and a large share of the claims payments,” said Iowa State University’s Dr Bruce Babcock about the US programme.
Research also showed that with farmers essentially making money by getting crop insurance, they tended to plant on environmentally sensitive lands regardless of the risk.
In the case of Canada, crop diversification – which benefits the environment – is also jeopardised. “Because crop diversification has been used by many farmers as a risk management tool, risk reduction, through Government programmes, can result in less incentive to diversify crops,” read a paper by Alison Eagle, James Rude, and Peter Boxall.
For the Soil Association, adopting the same schemes in the UK would result in weakened environmental protections.
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