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Crop Insurance and the New Deal Roots of Agricultural Financialization in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2020

Abstract

A range of private and public institutions emerged in the United States in the years before and after the Great Depression to help farmers confront the inherent uncertainty of agricultural production and marketing. This included a government-owned and operated insurance enterprise offering “all-risk” coverage to American farmers beginning in 1938. Crop insurance, initially developed as a social insurance program, was beset by pervasive problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. As managers and policy makers responded to those problems from the 1940s on, they reshaped federal crop insurance in ways that increasingly made the scheme a lever of financialization, a means of disciplining individual farmers to think of farming in abstract terms of risk management. Crop insurance became intertwined with important changes in the economic context of agriculture by the 1960s, including the emergence of the “technological treadmill,” permanently embedding financialized risk management into the political economy of American agriculture.

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© The Author 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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References

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Hansen, Per H.From Finance Capital to Financialization: A Cultural and Narrative Perspective on 150 Years of Financial History.” Enterprise & Society, 15 (December 2014): 605642.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harvey, David. “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 2007, 2244.Google Scholar
Isakson, S. Ryan.Food and Finance: The Financial Transformation of Agro-Food Supply Chains.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 41, no. 2 (2014): 127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jensen, Farrell E.The Farm Credit System as a Government-Sponsored Enterprise.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 22, no. 2 (2000): 326335.Google Scholar
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Lapavitsas, Costas. “Theorizing Financialization.” Work, Employment & Society, 25 (December 2011): 611626.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lapavitsas, Costas. “The Financialization of Capitalism: ‘Profiting without Producing.’” City, 17, no. 6 (2013): 792805.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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