OREANDA-NEWS  On 02 October was announced, that Novosibirsk hosted XI-th Interregional Scientific and Practical Conference ‘Insurance Industry Today and Development Perspectives: Insurance Protection of Population and Economic Entities’. The conference was sponsored by the branch of IJSC Ingosstrakh in Novosibirsk.

The conference offered to the attending insurers an opportunity to discuss the wide range of contemporary approaches to regulating the insurance market and development prospects of the insurance industry in 2008-2012. The conference participants made a number of proposals regarding improvement of effective legislation and relations of insurance companies with regional authorities.

The challenges of insurance in agriculture and potential solutions were enumerated in the report by Director of IJSC Ingosstrakh in Novosibirsk Dmitry Shevchenko. Today, agricultural insurance is faced with a number of problems that create a material inhibiting effect for the development of this market. The most acute one, according to the reporter, is the lack state policy in relation to agricultural insurance, as well as there are no legally binding norms and/or standards in crop insurance. Another important factor is that there is still no due control of expenditure of funds allocated to subsidize the cost of insurance by agricultural producers of crops and perennial plantings, there is no control of due performance of their commitments by insurance companies to the agrarians under insurance contracts.

All these problems trigger the so-called ‘gray insurance schemes’ which, in combination of the lack of norms and standards of assessing the potential impact of natural hazards complicate insurance claims handling processes.

‘To tackle these problems we need to provide for approval of a legal and enforceable procedure as regards insurance and identification of the size of damages resulting from various natural hazards with a view to the specifics of regional climates in the context of rural zoning, summarized Dmitry Shevchenko. – We also need to ensure stringent control of the use of funds allocated to subsidize the insurance premiums payable by agricultural companies and to create a system that would allow for control of performance of liabilities by insurers under relevant agricultural insurance contracts.’