Ebere Nwoji
The Royal Exchange General Insurance (REGIC), said it wishes to collaborate with government and other stakeholders in agriculture and food production to unlock the opportunities that abound in promoting the agribusiness value-chain.
This, according to the company, would aid the nation’s quest in achieving food sustainability, security and improved output.
REGIC, said this at a recent media briefing in Lagos, adding that it recently launched two variants of its agricultural index insurance products in 2019 under the ‘SMART AGRIC’ stable.
They are the Hybrid Index Insurance (HII) for small-holder farmers and Multi-Peril Crop Insurance cover (MPCI) embedded with Weather Index Insurance (WII)) for medium scale producers and crowd-funding agribusinesses.
REGIC Managing Director, Benjamin Agili, while speaking on the company’s adventure into agric insurance said, “Crucial to achieving these milestones were our strategic business partnerships with NIRSAL, AFEX commodity exchange, Bijan Farms, Green Eagles Agribusiness Solutions to mention a few.
“Having worked over a span of two years with NIRSAL developing and perfecting the initial designs and features of our first index product variant – the Hybrid Index insurance (HII) – we were able to launch same product in the 2019 wet-planting season; making Royal Exchange the first-ever insurer to launch this climate change protection package for the Nigerian market, Agili said.
According to him, REGIC HII product, stands out as an agricultural insurance protection product offered to small holder farmers and aggregators alike to protect their rain-fed agriculture from perils of climate change such as dry spells, drought, excess rainfall and flood etc, leading to crop shortfall or losses.
He said this was an advanced variant of Weather Index Insurance bundled with a vegetative index cover, better known as Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI).
He explained that the name ‘Hybrid’ Index was coined to emphasis the dual-trigger nature of the product which combines crop protection risks against climate change to growers of maize, sorghum, soybean and tomato crops etc in addition to a cover for an imminent loss of vegetation resulting from pest and diseases attack, environmental factors etc.
According to him, this combined protection ensures that small-holder farmers are adequately insured from all sorts of farming risks to be encountered throughout the farming or planting cycle.
“We believe our HII package serves as a risk transfer tool for farmers to use in redirecting their climate change and vegetation risks away to REGIC to manage on their behalf being a professional risk manager.
“The whole essence is to de-risking the face of farming business as we know it today to make farming a more business-friendly endeavour.”
