Title picture by “tribp”.
Authors: Marianne Lefebvre, Yann Raineau, Pauline Pedehour, Niklas Möhring, and Cécile Aubert
At a press conference on April 26, John Barker, Director of the International Wine Organization, announced a 10% drop in world wine production by 2023. Extreme environmental conditions – such as heavy rainfall in vineyards – have led to the development of fungal diseases (mildew, powdery mildew, black rot, etc.) in certain regions, and to crop failure.
Crops and income affected by climate and crop health hazards
Epidemics of fungal diseases are random phenomena, which can occur to a greater or lesser extent from one year or region to the next. While comprehensive weather insurance is available for losses due to meteorological hazards such as drought, frost, hail, etc., this is not the case for losses due to disease. To minimize this risk, certain fungicide treatments are used as a preventive measure, without any real certainty as to real-time disease pressure. This contributes to making viticulture one of the crops with the highest Treatment Frequency Index (TFI) (for example, 12 in 2019 versus 5 in 2021 for wheat, according to the cultural practice surveys in France). 100% of French vineyard plots received at least one fungicide treatment in 2019, including organic plots (representing 17% of vineyard hectares in 2020), which mainly use copper and sulfur as antifungal treatments. These treatments usually enable yields to be maintained, but are sometimes insufficient, as was the case recently in 2021 or 2023, when disease pressure was very high. What’s more, these treatments have a widely documented impact on environmental contamination (water, soil, air) and human health. Winegrowing is therefore a sector that is particularly targeted by pesticide reduction objectives in France (the Ecophyto plan, which continues despite adjustments) and in Europe.
Alternative practices exist to reduce the use of plant protection products without compromising yields, ranging from the use of biocontrol to a reduction in product dosage, right up to breakthrough options such as replacing vines with resistant varieties. However, these options come with new forms of risk, in terms of yield, product quality and consumer expectations, which partly explains the difficulties in adopting them. Among these practices, the use of Decision Support Tools (DST) helps to reduce uncertainty as to the actual local level of disease pressure, relying on algorithms based on pathogen development models, weather data and local observations. These tools can thus provide users with day-to-day recommendations on whether or not to protect their crops. But the use of these tools remains limited. Once again, this tool brings with it a new risk for users, concerning its reliability. A missed treatment in a sensitive period can lead to significant losses, and ultimately to a large number of fungicide treatments, this time for curative purposes.
Against this backdrop, solutions are being devised to help manage the risks engendered by these new practices. Could a “crop protection scheme” for vineyards be set up to support vine growers in this transition? We have discussed this question in a recent article published in the European Review of Agricultural Economics (Lefebvre et al., 2025).
Crop protection insurance: what economic model and what guarantees for vine growers?
The idea is to think about a new type of public intervention that does not consist of systematic aid payments (like Agri-Environmental and Climate Measures, which encourage farmers to follow specifications that enable them to reduce the environmental impact of their activity), but only in cases where the adoption of good practices leads to a loss of yield. The public instrument therefore serves to secure the change in practices. More precisely, the experimentation focused on the conditions for adopting a DSTto reduce fungal treatments. This tool was designed to enable users to eliminate unnecessary treatments (but not known as such at the time) while securing the achievement of a targeted yield. For example, in a year like 2019, which is less prone to disease outbreaks, the use of a DST would have enabled us to substantially reduce our IFT. With sanitary insurance, if a loss of yield is observed due to the failure of the DST, which recommended too few treatments, the winegrower is compensated for this loss. Even if this compensation does not replace the level of harvest expected by the grower, it may be more reassuring to adopt new vine protection practices in this context.
While the take-up rate of weather insurance among vine growers is high (44% of vineyards will be insured by 2023), there is much criticism, particularly of the high price of such insurance in relation to the yield insured (despite European subsidies), and also of the high degree of standardization of contracts, which are not always adapted to each individual farm.
However, the testimonies of several vine growers show an interest in securing pesticide reduction through health insurance. Several emphasize that they have already taken steps to reduce their use of fungicides, but that insurance to do so would be a plus: “I’ve proved that, compared with the average in Champagne, I’ve managed to keep 100% of my harvest while reducing my use of Phytosanitary measures”. On the financial side, “if we can insure our plots for the amount we save on phytosanitary measures, then even a 50% compensation for losses is worthwhile! Nevertheless, the subject of crop protection insurance is a divisive one, as some growers consider that it’s their job to manage this risk, and that they wish above all to produce grapes, and not just receive subsidies.
It is not yet possible to insure these vines against crop health risks in France. This type of insurance has only been tested as part of the ambitious Vitirev program for the agroecological transition of viticulture in New Aquitaine. As part of this program, insurer Groupama covered yield losses due to fungal diseases on around 100 hectares belonging to the Buzet (Lot-et-Garonne) and Tutiac (Gironde) cooperative wineries for four years. During the experiment, these vines were treated according to an insurable treatment protocol defined by an OAD designed by the Institut Français de la Vigne et du Vin, which reduced the average IFT by 30 to 55% depending on the vintage.
How acceptable is this type of insurance to vine growers?
As the conditions of this experiment were very specific, we were interested in the acceptability and impact of such a system if it were offered to all French vine growers. Based on a survey of 412 French vine growers, carried out in January 2023, we showed that between 48% and 60% of French vine growers would be prepared to take out an insurance policy whose compensation would be conditional on following the recommendations of an DST to reduce the use of fungicides (the percentage of adoption varying according to price and type of contract).
As is often the case, the devil is in the detail. To find out whether vine growers would be interested in such a scheme, we need to ask them about the precise terms of implementation. In addition to the financial aspects of contracts (how much do they cost? how much can they earn in the event of losses?), other contractual innovations have been tested. For example, the possibility of setting up such a contract for a group of vine growers via a mutual fund with compulsory contributions, rather than the traditional contract taken out by an individual on a voluntary basis. Parametric insurance also makes it possible to use an index (based in particular on satellite observations or data from control plots common to all the vine growers in a given area) rather than assessing losses by having an expert visit the plots. This latter, less costly method is favored by insurers. But what if a winegrower has very specific plots for which yields are poorly correlated with the index? The profession may be wary of these contractual innovations, when it comes to securing revenues that are sometimes low in certain wine-growing regions. The results of this survey indicate that vine growers reject compensation based on an index rather than on actual losses, and that they overwhelmingly prefer a contract with voluntary individual membership to a mutual fund with compulsory contributions.
By combining the data from this survey with data from an agronomic experiment on the performance of the DST, we show that the system could achieve an average reduction in fungicide use in France of around 45%. These good results are mainly due to the fact that the system is not particularly attractive to those who have already reduced their use of fungicides. According to our calculations, around a quarter of vine growers are already at high performance levels and would not be able to reduce their pesticide use any further by using the DST. As this proportion is no different in the group that declares an interest in insurance than in the others, the authors of the study conclude that there is no windfall effect. The realization of this optimistic reduction potential on a French scale will depend on the ability of the DST (developed in New Aquitaine) to perform equally well in other wine-growing regions where climatic and sanitary conditions differ.
In conclusion, we propose an innovative application of the concept of crop protection insurance, which makes the payment of compensation conditional on the adoption of virtuous practices if these practices have led to a loss of yield. By identifying the conditions that make such insurance more attractive to growers, these results help to identify the levers likely to bring about changes in viticultural practices, while guaranteeing income for growers. Such insurances could further become relevant for similar settings in other crops and countries.
This blog was originally published in French at: https://www.echosciences-paysdelaloire.fr/articles/vers-une-assurance-maladie-de-la-vigne
References
Lefebvre, M., Raineau, Y., Aubert, C., Möhring, N., Pedehour, P., & Raynal, M. (2025). Green Insurance for Pesticide Reduction: Acceptability and Impact for French Viticulture. European Review of Agricultural Economics, jbaf002. https://doi.org/10.1093/erae/jbaf002 (open access)