Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Today we will examine several aspects of the crop insurance program.
Crop insurance is one of the most important risk management tools available to producers today.
In 1994, Congress agreed that crop insurance was so important it linked crop insurance to participation in other federal agricultural programs. Bankers consider crop insurance so important that they often require insurance as a condition for loans. As a result of these facts, today more and more farmers are taking responsibility for their own risk management through the purchase of crop insurance. We accomplished this feat through a valuable partnership between the federal government and the private industry. We recognized that the risks associated with crop insurance were too variable and too severe for private industry to bear alone.