New federal program encourages private solutions to farm risk management

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

The federal government is resurrecting an old idea to encourage the farming industry and the private sector to develop new risk management tools for farmers.

On Monday, Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture Pierre Lemieux announced that up to $15 million is available for developing and adopting new private sector or producer-funded agricultural risk management tools. The money will be made available under Growing Forward 2’s AgriRisk Initiatives program.

Al Mussell, George Morris Centre senior research associate, says before the initial Growing Forward program was introduced in 2008 there was a program called private sector risk management partnerships. It was designed to provide resources for developing insurance-type programs and other options for industries to mitigate risks that were complimentary to existing business risk management programs, such as crop insurance.

Mussell says at the time of the private sector risk management partnerships program there were “quite a number of pretty innovative projects that came out.”

He notes he can infer from the government introducing the AgriRisk Initiatives program that “there is renewed interest on behalf of governments in having programs like that again. I think it makes good sense.”

The government press release says the AgriRisk Initiatives program is to facilitate industry-led research and development along with the implementation and administration of new insurance-based tools for the agriculture, agri-food and agri-products sectors. Applications are now being accepted.

The government will allocate a total of up to $3 million a year over five years for the program to fund research and development projects on potential new industry-led risk management products and services. Approved projects can be eligible for up to $500,000 annually. The money under the program can be used for:

• Research and development costs.
• Data collection and analysis.
• Legal and actuarial costs.
• Consultations. BF