Picture-based crop insurance: is it feasible? using farmers’ smartphone pictures to minimize the costs of loss verification

The Picture-Based Crop Insurance (PBI) project aims to develop a new way of delivering affordable and easy-to-understand crop insurance using farmers’ smartphone pictures to minimize the costs of loss verification. The project, funded by the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets(PIM), is a partnership between the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Borlaug Institute for South Asia (BISA), HDFC Ergo General Insurance, Limited, and researchers from The George Washington University, Boston University, and Ghent University. Millions of smallholder farmers lack access to affordable insurance - their farms are simply too small and too remote for insurers to affordably verify damage on insured farmers’ crops. By taking regular pictures using their own smartphones, farmers can reliably document damage after a natural calamity and provide evidence that the crop was managed appropriately until that point. This brings down the costs of loss verification substantially. Instead of sending an insurance agent to verify a farmer’s claim, insurance companies can appraise losses by simply processing the smartphone pictures, and can even rely on advances in image processing techniques to help automate the loss assessment procedure. In other words, PBI could directly provide insurers with eyes on the ground, at limited cost.