On Agricultural Insurance Development Of Yanbian Prefecture

Agricultural insurance has always been a hot topic in the worldwide insurance and agricultural economics. At present, in China, agricultural insurance mainly covers two aspects: policy-oriented agricultural insurance and commercial agricultural insurance. However, previous studies on agricultural insurance have proven that policy-oriented agricultural insurance should be placed first in the agricultural insurance development, because it can help to protect and promote farmers’ enthusiasms for production and work and offer essential and valuable social guarantee for a comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable development of agriculture and rural economy.China is an agricultural country. Affected by risk factors, farmers’incomes and agricultural economies have long been in an extremely unstable state. Objectively speaking, transferring and sharing economic losses are a good method to reduce economic losses. It is quite essential to build a new management mechanism in order to avoid and reduce risks. In this context, the Chinese agricultural insurance system has emerged at the historical moment. In the early days of its founding, China begun to implement agricultural insurance. However, due to influences of its own features and external environments, China was once trapped at low tide for several times, in its agricultural insurance development. On April 13,2007, the Chinese Ministry of Finance declared that Jilin, Inner Mongolia, Jiangsu, Hunan, Xinjiang and Sichuan would become the first batch of pilot provinces carrying out agricultural insurance, in the "Administrative measures of agricultural insurance premium". Owing to this, agricultural insurance has revived and develop in the true sense. Under the guarantee of Anhua, PICC and Anmeng as three insurance companies, Yanbian shows many practical problems, such as the insufficient publicity, the weak awareness and loose oversight, in its agricultural insurance development. Moreover, some illegal or criminal acts can be seen in this process. In this paper, a case study is made of the Anhua agricultural insurance in Yanbian Prefecture. To solve above-mentioned problems, the author proposes that more efforts should be invested in publicity, oversight, service, rural insurance system building and other aspects, in order to promote a healthy and sustainable development of agricultural insurance in Yanbian Prefecture.Firstly, definitions to agricultural insurance are given. Differences between agricultural insurance and other insurance are analyzed. Moreover, the author also figures out that its special nature determines that agricultural insurance should be mainly policy-oriented, and make an in-depth analysis and interpretation of features of agricultural insurance from four aspects:regionalism, seasonally, continuality and policy coloring. Secondly, agricultural insurance has features of quasi public goods and positive externality, which determines that agricultural insurance is policy-oriented insurance, instead of total commercial insurance. Due to the essential attribute of agricultural insurance, the Chinese government must develop some preferential policies for agricultural insurance by increasing financial support and subsidies to farmers and actively promoting farmers to buy agricultural insurance, so as to reduce huge losses of farmers caused by natural disasters and accidents. Lastly, a longitudinal study is conducted and examples are given to fully analyze the development current status of Yanbian Prefecture. Based on previous experiences and actual situations, recommendations, which accord with the actual development situation of agricultural insurance in Yanbian Prefecture, are given for its future work to solve these practical problems, from following aspects:putting more efforts to publicize agricultural insurance, strengthening supervision and improving the service quality. Moreover, the author also figures out that it is quite necessary to expand the coverage of agricultural insurance products, explore a rural insurance service system with joint development of agriculture-related insurance and agricultural insurance, and achieve the overall objective of financial service development in rural areas, on the basis of the actual situation of agricultural production in Yanbian Prefecture.