HARITA – a Food Insurance in Barter

The food, harvest and yield situation in Ethiopia is not sustainable at all. Even not the relief situation:

“The number of starving people will grow; the number of bags of food needed to keep them alive will grow.”

wrote Tina Rosenberg, author of the peer-pressure-book ‘Join the Club‘, in her recent NYT-blog post. She detected how to solve famine problems by famine insurances. How should this work at all? And how in Ehtiopia, our “case study?”

Well, it’s all about a food safety net. “W.F.P. had long worked with governments to give people bags of food in exchange for their labor on community infrastructure projects.” But this form of food-for-work or cash-for-work couldn’t stay sporadic any longer, because

“If farmers couldn’t count on it to be there when they needed it, they wouldn’t take the necessary risks to improve their harvests.”

And here comes insurance, a method that people all over the world use to mitigate risks. Oxfam America staff workers spent months talking to farmers in Tigray about insurance, explaining what it was.

“The suggestion was made by a farmer,” Oxfam reported. ‘This is something I would be quite interested in,” he said, “if I could pay for it with my labor, the same way I can pay for food in the safety net.’ ”

In turn Oxfam developed and created

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• HARITA: The Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaptation

  Oxfam America has developed a holistic risk management framework to enable poor farmers in Ethiopia to strengthen their food and income security through a combination of improved resource management (risk reduction), microcredit (“smart” risk taking), risk transfer (insurance), and risk reserves (savings). The Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaptation (HARITA) project implemented in Ethiopia is the first example of this pioneering approach. Initiated in 2007 through an innovative partnership that brought together Ethiopian farmers, the Relief Society of Tigray (REST), Nyala Insurance Share Company, Dedebit Credit and Savings Institution (DECSI), Mekelle University, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), Swiss Re, the Rockefeller Foundation, and six other organizations including a farmers’ cooperative, local government agencies, a local agriculture research organization, and global legal experts, the project has broken new ground in the field of risk management by enabling Ethiopia’s poorest farmers to pay for their insurance with their own labor.

  Source: HARITA quarterly report: October 2010–December 2010

Similar to the the Kilimo Salama insurance program in Kenya this insurance looks to rainfall levels rather than to actual crop losses.

Read more: To Survive Famine, Will Work for Insurance by Tina Rosenberg (New York Times/Opinionator Blogs)

by atsil