By Babajide Okeowo
For farmers in Nigeria, happy times are here as the Nigerian Agricultural Insurance Corporation, NAIC has assured that insured farmers will receive payment of claims whenever natural disasters occur.
Deputy General Manager, Technical, NAIC, Bashir Martins made this known while answering questions from journalists at a one day ‘Agricultural Insurance Sensitization Workshop’ for Farmers in the Federal Capital Territory.
“Agribusiness is evolving fast and so many risks are being thrown up, many new participants are coming into the business of agriculture, and the risks are on the increase.
If you look at them across the value chain there are so many participants so we need to keep sensitizing the farmers and let them know we are serving them, and we need to know from them how to serve them.
Our assurance to farmers is that when they are insured and they suffered from what they insured including natural disasters that they will get paid for their losses, and that is the purpose of insurance and setting up NAIC.
Our motor is ‘Plowing the Farmer Back to Business, Plowing the Farmers into Prosperity’, and we settle claims” he said.
Martins also explained that the essence of the sensitization is to let the farmers known and understand exactly what NAIC does, the importance of insurance, and make them understand how insurance works, how they can access NAIC products and services, processing their claims, and what they need.
He further stated that they were out to know farmers’ challenges as it concerns insurance as well as the expectation of NAIC, which the corporation does not lay claim to doing it 100 percent, but is trying, and will keep improving on what they do.
“But we believe that it takes two to tangle, the contract is between NAIC and the respective farmers, we need to let them know what is an insurance contract, and what is expected of them and they should, in turn, know what is expected from us,” he said
On his part, the Deputy General Manager, General Business and Enterprise Risk Management, NAIC, Innocent Ogbu lamented Nigerian farmers’ response to insurance which he describes as not encouraging.
“The response of small and medium enterprises varies with farmers in this class. Those in small scale farming feel why they should pay N2000 or N5000, which makes the response very slow. The major responses we are getting are through the banks that are on farming loans tied to agriculture. More or less is like a forced response because they took a loan from the bank and the bank wants them to insure the loan” he said
