Workshop presents results for restructuring Garantia-Safra

The Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply held this Wednesday (6) a workshop in Brasília, in partnership with the World Bank Group and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), to discuss the restructuring of the Garantia-Safra program, aimed at family farmers from states in the Northeast and North of Minas Gerais who suffer from systematic production losses due to drought or excessive rainfall. At the event, the results of the diagnosis were presented based on two surveys carried out with members of the Management Committee and Garantia-Safra technicians and extensionists. The diagnosis showed that the program has a complex operationalization, due to the short deadlines in the registration, selection and adhesion processes of farmers until the beginning of planting, as well as in making financial contributions to the Harvest Guarantee Fund, in verifying crop losses. in municipalities and in generating payroll for beneficiaries.

Operational problems and short deadlines impact management and must be improved because, currently, there are many variables to be taken into consideration when granting benefits. "We noticed an excess of regulations, many of which are conflicting, restrictions on the number of crops that farmers can plant and a lack of research and technical assistance to support the Garantia-Safra family farmers", says Carlos Mercês, general coordinator of the Family Farming Insurance, from the Mapa Agricultural Policy Secretariat. 

The director of the Department of Risk Management at the Ministry of Agriculture, Pedro Loyola, said that the results of the working group are just the starting point for the federal government to make improvements. "The proposals for priority actions will be discussed in the Steering Committee in three stages and should take two years to be implemented," he says.

In 2020, a communication plan and a pilot project to train technicians and agents working in the program must be created. “In addition, Embrapa, with Inmet and Cemaden, have already started studying a new loss verification index in municipalities with a parametric insurance concept", highlights Loyola.

The event was attended by experts in the field, researchers from Embrapa, representatives of bodies such as the National Agency for Technical Assistance and Rural Extension (Anater), the National Institute of Meteorology (Inmet) and the National Center for Monitoring and Alerting of Natural Disasters (Cemaden ), and representatives from state governments, the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (Contag) and the Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock (CNA).  

Restructuring

The objective of restructuring Garantia-Safra is to improve the performance, reach and efficiency of the program, whose beneficiaries are farmers with a monthly family income of, at most, one and a half minimum wages and who plant between 0,6 and 5 hectares corn, beans, rice, cassava or cotton. They receive a benefit of R$850, paid in five installments of R$170, when the municipality in which they live proves the loss of at least 50% of all these productions.

The program's Restructuring GT concludes its work in November. In the last four months, 12 meetings were held, such as workshops, regional meetings and meetings with experts. During the work, a diagnosis was also carried out based on two surveys carried out with members of the Management Committee and Garantia-Safra technicians and extensionists.