The federal government has relied primarily on two policy tools in recent years to help mitigate the financial losses experienced by crop farmers as a result of natural disasters — a federal crop insurance program and congressionally mandated ad-hoc crop disaster payments. Congress has made several modifications to the crop insurance program since the 1980s, in an effort to forestall the demand for supplemental disaster payments. Although the scope of the crop insurance program has widened significantly over the past 25 years, the anticipated goal of crop insurance replacing disaster payments has not been achieved.

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