Assurer les calamités agricoles ?[Insure agricultural natural disasters ?]

For more than 40 years, in France, compensation for damage caused to crops by climatic hazards is essentially a public policy, only losses due to hail which are the subject of widespread insurance. The existence of this public compensation system and the technical obstacles for the introduction of insurance on various climate risks has long frozen the “insurance” and “non insurable” risks frontier, despite several attempts to development of insurance beyond hail risk alone. For a long time, the State had supported, through subsidies to premiums, fruit and vegetable hail insurance. From 2002 to 2005, the State supported the accession of new contracts protecting certain crops from a small number of risks However, the Commission has not yet been able to make any significant progress in this area. From 2005, the choice was made to give priority to the development of new crop insurance covering a wide range of climate risks, potentially, for all crops. For its first two years of implementation (2005-2006), this new programme has mainly spread in field crops, from hail contracts pre-existing insurance companies have extended the guarantees to other climatic hazards. The extension to other crops, which are more exposed, may require adaptations of the measures, and, in particular, a targeting of aid, a more precise framework for subsidized contracts and the planning for the end of public indemnisation. The costs of the subsidies to private insurances may be higher than the cost of the current public indemnisation system