Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at how insurance imagines agricultural futures. Insurance companies imply that they are better suited than farmers to gaze into the future and I will argue that in so doing insurance suggests boundaries to what is imaginable by whom in the face of climate change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at how insurance imagines agricultural futures. Connecting to the recent interest in the nexus between climate change and risk management by sociology and geography (e.g. Taylor 2016, Isakson 2015, Elliot 2018), I will interrogate how insurance companies conceive and represent the growing uncertainties of environmental degradation and reimagine their place in the securing of agricultural livelihoods. Insurance companies see for themselves a role in bringing under control the precarity which farmers endure in the face of climate change, particularly in emerging economies. Embedded in the narratives of advertisements and reports are concerns and ominous prospects of unchecked climatic risks, while simultaneously showcasing a utilitarian sense of opportunity to transform the uncertainties into profit for shareholders. Following observations by Lehtonen (2017) and others, I suggest that by circumscribing agricultural risk as something to be brought under control through calculative finance, insurance companies imply that they are better suited than farmers to gaze into the future, imagine the growing risks of climate change and do something about them. Meanwhile farmers, it is asserted, do not have the technical means nor the cognitive capabilities to adequately estimate the future uncertainties facing them. They are accused of short-sightedness; unduly imagining untroubled futures for themselves and under-appreciating risks which lie beyond the present. This, I will argue, suggests boundaries to what is imaginable by whom and leads to specific roles for insurance and its customers vis-à-vis the future in a situation where the spectre of climate change looms large over agriculture.