By Mitchell Lierman
Impacted by drought and export disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine, insurance spending for corn versus that for other crops in 2023 grew to its widest-ever gap.
Increases in annual total corn premiums outpaced other highly-insured crops over the past five years. These policy premiums are paid for, in part, by government subsidies, which on average covered 62% of the crop insurance costs for farmers in 2022, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Deadlines to purchase spring-planted crop insurance were one month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. According to data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity, an open-source project for visualizing world economic data, Ukraine was responsible for 9.3% of global corn exports in 2021.