The adoption of agricultural insurance to manage farm risk: preliminary evidences from a field survey among Italian and Polish farmers

Among EU Member States, Italian and Polish agriculture recorded the highest number of farms with income losses, due to adverse climatic events and market related risks. In line with its primary challenge of managing risk in agriculture, the Common Agricultural Policy encourages farmers’ adoption of risk man-agement tools as insurance, which covers against production losses due to many different risks. However, the success of this instrument seems to be very heterogeneous and the efforts to examine this are still limited in the literature. This paper provides some preliminary insights from a field survey among farmers in Poland and Italy. In particular, differences in behavioural aspects (e.g. perceptions, preferences) related to risk at farm level and insurance tool were investigated, showing some differences between producers in these two EU Member States.