Center

Insurance, bankcard ease farmers' financial woes

(China Daily)
Updated: 2006-10-04 08:35

Whether farmers in China stay home to work on the land or are part of the huge group of migrants who criss-cross the country looking for jobs, steps have been taken to ease some of their financial worries.

One of them involves life insurance, a concept that has come to China mostly in the past 10 years. The other involves a bankcard that will allow migrant workers to transfer money from banks in the cities where they work to their hometown co-operatives for only a small transaction fee.

Ji Yueming has a debt of more than 20,000 yuan (US$2,500) but bought a life insurance policy for himself this year, with an annual premium of 910 yuan (US$114).

Because his wife also had a life insurance policy for two years when she died of kidney cancer this year, he received a disbursement of 20,000 yuan from China Life, the country's largest life insurer.

"Without the insurance, I would have had more debt," Ji told China Daily, adding the family had spent around 30,000 yuan (US$3,750) trying to cure his wife.

"It's such a pity that we didn't buy more insurance at that time."

With 1.3 hectares of farmland, Ji's gross income hovers around 10,000 yuan (US$1,250) every year. Having a comparatively strong insurance sense, Ji Yueming is typical of thousands of farmers in Jiuquan, a county in Northwest China's Gansu Province.

Although Jiuquan's annual per capita revenue is only 4,000 yuan (US$500), the premium per person, or the premium density, has exceeded 400 yuan (US$50), beating the country's national average of 368 yuan (US$46).

"Providing more value-added services and enlisting highly talented people for the sales team are the two keys," Zhang Deming, general manager of the Jiuquan branch of China Life, told China Daily.