Investigators at Mississippi State University Discuss Findings in Crop Insurance (The End of Direct Farm Payments and Rural Poverty In the American Midwest): Agriculture – Crop Insurance

2025 JAN 02 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Researchers detail new data in Agriculture - Crop Insurance. According to news reporting out of Mississippi State, Mississippi, by NewsRx editors, the research stated, “A risk management approach to farm policy, emblematic of ongoing neoliberalization of domestic agricultural policy, favors the private sector and large-scale producers at the expense of small and mid-sized producers, taxpayers, and rural communities. During 2014, direct payments paid to agricultural producers were finally eliminated in favor of commodity programs that mimic crop insurance.”

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from Mississippi State University, “At the same time, poverty rates across rural America remain higher than national averages and, in some places, continue to increase. Previous approaches to explaining rural poverty highlight the social, economic, and political processes that contribute to poverty in rural communities, yet the political economy of agriculture has rarely been considered a determinant of rural poverty. This paper expands earlier work on agricultural policy and rural poverty by investigating the relationship between farm policy and rural poverty across rural counties in the American Midwest since 1995. By employing a pooled-time series approach and utilizing poverty, unemployment, commodity payment, crop insurance payment, and agricultural data, the findings demonstrate that the elimination of direct payments has further reduced potential of farm programs to ameliorate poverty in rural communities and in some places, is related to an increase in poverty.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Overall, the end of direct payments had standardized poverty rates in these counties at rates higher than national averages suggesting that the deepening of risk management approaches to farm policy has serious implications for both producers and rural communities.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: The End of Direct Farm Payments and Rural Poverty In the American Midwest. Agriculture and Human Values, 2024. Agriculture and Human Values can be contacted at: Springer, Van Godewijckstraat 30, 3311 Gz Dordrecht, Netherlands. (Springer - www.springer.com; Agriculture and Human Values - http://www.springerlink.com/content/0889-048x/)

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Aimee Imlay, Mississippi State University, Dept. of Sociology, Mississippi State, MS 39762, United States.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-024-10662-4. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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