Satellite Imagery+Crop Insurance=Small Holder Farmer's Gain

Satellite intelligence is enriching new insurance products aimed at helping India's smallholders to withstand climate shocks

- Giriraj Amarnath

August is usually a tense time for farmers in Bihar, India. Having sown crops in July, they eagerly await the arrival of rains to sustain them. But Bihar is a flood-prone state. All too often, heavy rains cause floods that wash away crops, leaving farmers with no food and no produce to sell to earn a living.

This year, however, more than 200 of Bihar’s farming households will be more relaxed. They are covered for flood damage to their crops by a pilot Index-Based Flood Insurance (IBFI) scheme launched by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), with funding from the CGIAR’s Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) programs. If the floodwaters are sufficiently extensive, the farmers will receive compensation.

The initiative is part of the efforts by IWMI to use the latest remote sensing data, Geographical Information System (GIS) technology and computer modeling to benefit poor and marginalized farmers. The approach called as AgRISE (Agricultural Remote sensing Insurance for Security and Equity) seeks to provide all farmers, no matter how small, with the security that insurance can provide.

Improvements in agricultural productivity in developing countries are thought to play a key role in reducing poverty. Unfortunately, farming outputs remain poorly measured throughout much of the world, hampering efforts to evaluate and target productivity-enhancing interventions. By using high-resolution satellite imagery, together with field data collected from thousands of smallholder plots in India, IWMI has been able to not only estimate and understand yield variation at the field scale over large areas, but also monitor flooding. This data has helped to develop various insurance products to safeguard farmers’ outputs.

Developing the product