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Agriculture Climate

Assessing the Potential of Climate-Smart Cocoa Insurance

By Justin D. McKinley, Rebecca A. Asare, L. Lanier Nalley
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There is now widespread consensus that Ghana should adopt a climate-smart cocoa (CSC) approach, and significant steps have been made towards implementing this vision. A CSC Working Group established in 2011 identified key gaps that needed to be addressed or improved for CSC to reach a desired future state, and recommended a focus on increasing yields, de-risking cocoa farming, and enhancing landscape planning, data management, and MRV.

Crop yield insurance has been identified as a key element of the CSC approach because of the role it could play in mitigating farmers’ economic risk and reducing forest degradation and deforestation – the idea being that producers could potentially receive crop insurance as a benefit for adopting CSC practices and adhering to climate-smart principles. However, crop insurance is limited in Ghana, and there is a paucity of work exploring the potential of crop insurance for cocoa production in the country.

As such, this study set out to assess the feasibility of crop insurance as part of a CSC landscape initiative in Ghana. It argues that that Weather Index Insurance (WII) presents the best match to Ghana’s cocoa sector and the goals of CSC. The study also lends considerable weight to the argument that CSC—in and of itself—is viable.