Because of the dimension that the negative impact of climate change on global agricultural production has, small-scale farmers in developing countries can no longer absorb the negative impacts of climatic threats within their traditional risk management strategies but have to look for supplementary risk management instruments to deal with the new dimension of these threats. Index-based agricultural insurances are microinsurance schemes which serve the specific needs of small-scale farmers in development countries and which are means to stabilise the income of rural households in case of harvest failures. However, development of index-based agricultural microinsurances is still in its infancy, and hardly any successful examples exist.

Gertraud Faltermeier
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH
Division 45 - Agriculture, Fisheries and Food
Eschborn, Germany
Gertraud.Faltermeier@gtz.de