Frost Risk and Rural Insurance in Brazil

Abstract In developing countries, such as Brazil, farmers are susceptible to extreme events.The Brazilian federal government created insurance programs to mitigate extreme event effects, such as frost, called “Programa de Subvenção ao Prêmio do Seguro Rural”. Frost is an atmospheric phenomenon that causes damage to plants due to low temperatures that exceed their resistance to freezing. This paper seeks to verify the risk level of frost in Brazil, connecting this information with farmers, who contracted Rural Insurance to protect themselves from this extreme event. To reduce possible biases in calculating the frost probability, this study uses two climatological databases. The majority of the Brazilian territory has very low probabilities of this phenomenon occurring. In the databases used to verify the probability of a temperature below 2 °C, the data proposed by Sheffield paper, show that, in part of the Brazilian territory, there is less chance of frost than Xavier's data. Regardless of the database used, in Brazil, there are farmers who contract frost insurance in areas where the risks are close to zero.