Crop Insurance in Foreign Countries: A Summary of Significant Developments

With the growing interest in Federal crop insurance in the United States, the question arises as to what governments in other countries have done to solve this problem. While proposals for extensive crop insurance have been made abroad, foreign countries, with the exception of the Soviet Union, have so far confined practical application of such insurance to specific risks, principally hail. These schemes, therefore, hardly afford any actuarial basis for the development of "all risk" crop insurance in the United States. Some of the foreign insurance schemes and proposals, however, are not without interest, and significant developments in this field, by countries for which information is available, are discussed in this report.