I’ll also note this:
Crop insurance companies are already strategizing how to minimize their losses as climate change intensifies. Since they receive federal subsidies, they cannot withdraw from markets as easily as home insurance providers have in fire-, hurricane- and flood-prone areas.
Last year, the federal government blocked insurance providers’ attempts to pull out of West Texas, a region that’s been scorched by heat and drought.
they would have to drastically increase premiums if they cant pull out.
A quick reading suggests this can be fixed by reallocating the government subsidies.
Agreed. Stop subsidizing it. This will obviously hurt the farmers in the area but hey, free market. Insurance isn’t a charity.
But why? I mean the effects of that are pretty regressive right?
As a country, we want to be able to produce lots of food, that’s a good thing. And we want to keep the price of food down, that’s also a good thing. We don’t want a scenario where food is so expensive that more people need to start making hard choices between eating and rent. And regardless of that extreme example, if we see higher prices on food, that’s going to have a greater impact on the poor than on the wealthy.
We subsidize lots of things, fuel, education, home renovation, etc. Many of these subsidies are pretty important to making our economy operate smoothly. Food production seems like one of those things that’s worth paying for.
It seems to me that the problem isn’t that we shouldn’t be subsidizing farm insurance, but that we need tighter controls on what the insurance companies are allowed to do. We’ve seen it in every sector, insurance companies will take advantage of people with unfair policies and always refuse to pay out if they possibly can. But crop insurance is an important and valuable safeguard, we shouldn’t throw it out entirely, we just need to keep the insurers from being criminally greedy and make sure that even smaller farm operations have access to this service.
I agree. We all need farmers to do well in order to live.
This article doesn’t mention other subsidies given to the big farmers.
Also, the farm lobby would fight any changes
