Insurance and more for Sri Lanka's disaster preparedness

Rasika Somarathna in Daily News (Sri Lanka): The Disaster Management Ministry is planning to introduce a special insurance scheme for homes in identified disaster prone areas to protect property owners against potential losses during a natural calamity.

The insurance is to be extended to home owners whose houses are located within identified risk zones subject to recurring natural disasters such as floods, earth slips, quakes etc. An official said the insurance premiums would be borne by the ministry. A proposal in this regard has already been formulated.

Disaster Management Minister Mahinda Amaraweera recently said his ministry is prepared to demonstrate earthquake resistant construction techniques for those planning to build houses or other structures in earthquake prone areas.

Minister Amaraweera said his ministry will also introduce several other measures to lessen the impact of natural disasters in the coming year. Another such measure, according to the minister is the upgrading of the Meteorology Department. He said plans were afoot to install latest equipment available in the international market to upgrade the capacity of Meteorology Department and improve its prediction capability. The Doppler radar installed at the summit of Gongala Mountain in Deniyaya at Rs 400 million too will begin operations from next year, he said....

Weather extremes push Sri Lanka to adopt crop insurance

Amantha Perera in AlertNet: Sri Lanka plans to offer a national crop insurance scheme to help farmers cope with increasingly severe and disruptive weather and resulting crop losses. In presenting the national budget for 2013 recently, President Mahinda Rajapaksa said the government was moving toward ways of managing long-term severe weather events, particularly worsening drought.

“In the future, the economic losses of drought must be managed in a more meaningful manner. Therefore, I propose to implement a crop insurance scheme for all farmers,” he said.

This is the first occasion that such a scheme has been put in place. Officials said funds of around $1 million (Rs 1000m) will be set aside for the project through a National Insurance Trust Fund. The money would come from compulsory contributions from banking, financial and insurance companies. Farmers who benefit from a fertilizer subsidy scheme will also have to make a contribution of around one dollar (Rs 150) for every 50kg of fertilizer they draw under the subsidy scheme. Rajapaksa said that at least 100,000 farmers will benefit from the project if they lose their crops.

The new scheme comes in the wake of an eight month drought that has hurt the country’s staple rice production. The drought was broken during the last week of October – but by flash flooding brought on by Cyclone Nisha, which killed 10 people, damaged over 5,000 homes and left 200,000 people affected, according to the government’s Disaster Management Centre....

A pastoral scene in Sri Lanka, shot by Hash Milhan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license