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Global food and agricultural leaders face a heightened risk environment, including unpredictable crop yields, fluctuating consumer demand, and unforeseen transportation bottlenecks. Marsh can help you navigate these risks to sustain growth and profitability for your business.
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Today’s global food and agricultural companies face heightened pressure to be increasingly integrated across the value chain. The application of new technology has helped businesses meet this demand, leading to improved productivity and efficiencies across the supply chain.

Although this digital transformation offers new opportunities for innovation, reach, and scale, it creates new vulnerabilities amid the myriad of risk-related challenges already present across the industry.

The growth of yield has slowed to an unsustainable rate in the face of a rapidly growing global population. Coupled with increasing environmental concerns such as land use issues and extreme weather impacts from droughts and hailstorms, and unforeseen transportation bottlenecks arising from the pandemic, companies within the agricultural sector are exposed on many fronts.

Based on our agricultural industry expertise, our dedicated risk management professionals can assist your business with creating a proactive plan that can help support sustained growth, identify opportunities for investment in new technologies, and lower your total cost of risk. Working together, we can help you protect your people, your property, and your bottom line.

Today’s global food and agricultural companies face heightened pressure to be increasingly integrated across the value chain. Companies are increasing their adoption of technology and expanding supply chain structures to maintain market share, while facing challenges from severe weather events, increasing regulations, and cyberattacks. The COVID-19 pandemic accentuated and exacerbated many of these risks as some supply chains failed or were severely curtailed.

The growth of yield has slowed to an unsustainable rate in the face of a rapidly growing global population. Coupled with increasing environmental concerns such as land use issues and extreme weather impacts from droughts and hailstorms, and unforeseen transportation bottlenecks arising from the pandemic, companies within the food and agricultural sectors are exposed on many fronts.

Marsh helps food and agricultural companies — from manufacturers and processors to distributors and wholesalers — anticipate the risks they face, understand their impacts, and implement comprehensive plans to mitigate them. Working together, we can help you protect your people, your property, and your bottom line.

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Each business faces risks unique to their day-to-day operations. However, the agricultural industry as a whole is confronted by several major areas of risk, including:

  • Growing population: The world’s population is expected to grow from 7.5 billion to 10 billion by 2050, requiring at least a 70% increase in the total availability of food. However, heightened ecological concerns will make it difficult to expand production utilizing traditional methods. Agricultural suppliers must find ways to innovate across multiple activities in the supply chain to boost productivity, total yield, and market access.
  • Climate change: The increasing unpredictability of weather – droughts, hailstorms, floods, and wildfires – has created new vulnerabilities as agricultural businesses seek to adapt to fluctuating consumer demands in the face of unsteady crop yields.
  • Disease: Epidemics and pandemics, whether human (COVID0-19) or animal (African swine fever, avian flu), have greatly impacted the livestock industry and caused serious supply chain disruptions.
  • Cyber: Increasingly, the internet of things (IoT) is being leveraged throughout the agricultural industry for enhanced visibility and transparency across the supply chain. However, this growing dependence on IoT-enabled systems creates new food safety and distribution concerns in the event of an outage or a malicious attack. Businesses will need to create processes to continuously monitor their cybersecurity and replace lost goods, produce, or livestock if a failure cannot be prevented.
  • Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) expectations: The environmental and social credentials of agriculture producers are increasingly important to food manufacturers and the end consumer. ESG expectations create a reputational risk for farmers and commodity buyers that needs to be carefully managed.

Agricultural companies need to create a proactive risk management program that addresses these risks. Marsh’s specialists can help you identify the steps to take to mitigate the impact of each of these threats and the relevant insurance coverage to reduce your total cost of risk.

Businesses within the agricultural industry possess specialized properties and assets that require specialized insurance coverage to reduce risks to growth and profitability. Some of the most crucial policies include:

  • Crop insurance: This protects farmers and agricultural producers against the loss of crops as a result of extreme weather, such as floods, hail, and drought, and the loss of revenue due to fluctuations in the market.
  • Farm structure insurance: In the event that a structure such as a barn, silo, or coop is damaged in a storm or from other natural causes, farm structure insurance provides assistance in rebuilding to minimize downtime and related production losses.
  • Livestock insurance: There are several different types of livestock insurance – the variety of coverage your business will need is dependent on the animals you own and the purpose they serve.
  • Liability insurance: There are many types of liability insurance available, including coverage designed to protect people visiting your farm or the property of others if damaged due to your farm operations. It can cover bodily injury caused by livestock, illness caused by products sold at farmers markets, agratainment liability, fire legal liability, employee health and safety, and accidental pollution.

Although the assets each agricultural business must consider in their risk management approach significantly vary, more specialized policies such as the above can help mitigate losses and address risk vulnerabilities across the industry as a whole.

A comprehensive approach to risk management not only includes specialized coverage for agricultural-specific assets, but also accounts for common business risks such as:

  • Cyber: Any computer-based processes used for day-to-day operations are at risk of being hacked. As artificial intelligence and autonomous technology become increasingly widespread in the agricultural industry, leaders will need to consider what coverage and risk management strategies are needed to protect the information and processes potentially being exposed to third-party actors.
  • Workers’ compensation: The role of workers’ compensation insurance, where available, or similar coverages is complex but vital within the agricultural industry, as the sector is one of the largest in terms of annual workers’ compensation claims. Employers will need to mitigate the risk of and plan for claims as a result of incidents such as vehicle hazards, heat exposure, slips and falls, and any injuries sustained while working with equipment.
  • Business interruption: Business interruption insurance covers the loss of income suffered after a disaster or adverse incident. Proactive planning against business interruptions should extend to pandemic-related closures and losses and account for coverage against livestock diseases including African swine fever and avian influenza.

For today’s agricultural businesses, maintaining operations is essential to remaining profitable and keeping up with high global and local consumer demands. At Marsh, we can help you create a proactive risk management program to mitigate risk, defend your assets, and invest for the future.

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Allan Frawley

Food Agri Practice Leader Ireland

  • Ireland