Experts in the field

Climate change, population growth and demand for biofuels have made agriculture a crucial concern for governments and industry alike. A new book, World Crop Reinsurance, aims to highlight the risks and special characteristics of this emerging field.

Nigel Ralph, a property specialist with Lloyd’s Underwriting Performance Team and co-author of the book, says that it aims to be as complete a reference as possible. “There have been many magazine and academic articles on this topic, but there was no comprehensive reference text,” he says.

Originally, Ralph and his co-author Colin Packham, a crop reinsurance consultant, had set out to write a text on the principles of agricultural reinsurance. But, as markets changed and more data became available, it developed into a book that covered all major markets.

Crop reinsurance is an expanding business. “The business within Lloyd’s, for example, is mainly the reinsurance of US crop companies, but recently it has expanded to writing international crop reinsurance through syndicates such as Novae,” explains Ralph.

The expansive scope of the book has become all the more necessary given the greater prominence agriculture has been given of late. In the US, for example, which is by far the world’s largest crop insurance market, there has been a sea change in attitudes to crops.

“Until 2008, food was as cheap as it could get, but then suddenly the wheat price doubled,” says Ralph. “Now it is seen as a valuable commodity, so the US government is more interested in protecting the interests of that market.”

The global market for crop insurance has also increased, leading to greater opportunities for insurers and brokers. “The US drives the market, but in the book we also looked at all the major world markets,” Ralph explains. “China, for example, went from very little a few years ago to be the third-largest insurance market in the world.”

To ensure a global perspective, other contributors to the book include academics and insurance specialists with knowledge of markets from Australia and Latin America to the US and Ukraine. As Ralph says: “We wanted the book to be an A to Z of crop reinsurance”.

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