Thailand’s crop insurance 2015 scheme was recently kicked off in central region’s Ang Thong province on 15 May.  Finance Minister Sommai Phasee opened the launch ceremony with over 300 farmers attending the event. GIZ’s ASEAN Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) project’s representatives were also present.

The Bank of Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) is the distribution and claims processing arm of the Thai rice insurance scheme. GIZ signed a “Memorandum of Understanding on joint technical cooperation in the field of strengthening marketing & distribution for crop insurance for smallholder farmers” with BAAC under the SAS’s RIICE (“Remote sensing based information and insurance for crops in emerging economies”) public-private-partnership project.

RIICE is carried by five parties, namely Allianz Re, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) (German Development Cooperation), Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and sarmap. The parties aim to establish a public-private-partnership model to transfer natural catastrophe risks from farmers and governments to the private insurance sector. The project makes use of remote sensing technologies to observe the growth of rice. Through timely and transparent information on crop losses due to natural catastrophes, insurers can act quickly and pay claims systematically.

It was agreed in the MoU that RIICE will support BAAC in running its insurance operations more efficiently.