Study on the assessment approach for crop loss risk

This paper proposes a new approach to assess crop loss risk more accurately by using cause of loss data. We believe the new approach can overcome the ‘risk underestimate problem’ of the traditional approach and can capture the underlying risk distribution. Corn loss risk assessments of eight provinces in the Chinese Corn Belt based on the two kinds of approaches are used to test the feasibility and effect of our proposed approach. Empirical results prove that 1) yield aggregation of the traditional approach not only underestimates the true risk, but also twists the underlying risk distribution; and 2) cause of loss data, rather than yield data, are preferred in the assessment of crop risk for a higher-level region.