DA taps Swiss tech for crop insurance

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Agriculture has partnered with a Swiss firm to provide farmers with better crop insurance through the use of satellite technology.

The DA, through the Planters Products Inc., signed a memorandum of agreement with Swiss developer Satsure AG to digitize the local farm sector.

The project, with an initial funding of P5 million, targets to provide satellite imaging for 100,000 hectares planted with rice and 40,000 hectares planted with various crops within six months.

It will be piloted in Nueva Ecija, Iloilo, and North Cotabato.

Agriculture Secretary William Dar said the initiative would “help in our ongoing efforts to provide our farmers with direct and targeted assistance to improve their productivity.”

He added that the project would help DA improve its disaster response, particularly on risk insurance, noting that crop monitoring should be leveled up.

“The traditional source of information, which relies heavily on fieldwork, will be insufficient in the country. As we modernize our agriculture sector, we must continuously to explore for relevant technology to increase sufficiency and productivity,” he said.

Satsure AG is a developer based in Switzerland whose works include remote sensing satellite and other sensing sources to monitor agricultural crop portfolio and estimate agriculture yields with the objective of enabling better risk management and improving crop insurance and agriculture lending to farmers.

It leverages advances in satellite remote sensing, machine learning and big data analytics to provide answers to large area questions across the domains of agriculture, banking and financial service, infrastructure and climate change mitigation.

The Philippine Crop Insurance Corp., DA’s insurance arm, provides insurance protection to farmers against losses arising from natural calamities, plant diseases and pest infestations of palay (unhusked rice), corn and other crops.

Under PCIC’s existing agriculture insurance program, farmers and fisherfolks listed in the Registry System for Basic Sectors in Agriculture are provided with free crop insurance coverage.

The premium payment for their crop insurance is fully paid by the government.

From providing rice and corn insurance, the firm has evolved and developed an expanded range of insurance products that now includes high-value crops, livestock, fisheries, non-crop agricultural assets, and credit and life-term insurance.