International Journal of Research and Review Vol.8; Issue: 2; February 2021 Website: www.ijrrjournal.com Research Paper E-ISSN: 2349-9788; P-ISSN: 2454-2237 International Journal of Research and Review (ijrrjournal.com) 294 Vol.8; Issue: 2; February 2021 Factors Affecting Crop Insurance Holding Intention of Farmers in Nepal Gangaram Biswakarma 1 , Nisha Rana 2 1 Assistant Professor, Faculty of Management, Tribhuvan University, Nepal 2 Kumari Bank Ltd, Nepal Corresponding Author: Gangaram Biswakarma ABSTRACT Natural disasters such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, landslides, erratic rainfall, earthquakes, and many other climate change- related problems often affect agricultural production and farm income in Nepal. Agriculture's vulnerability to such disasters is exacerbated by epidemics and man-made disasters such as arson, spurious seed sales, fertilizers and pesticides, market crashes, etc. Such factors have exposed the higher risk to agri-business. Crop insurance is one of the main means and methods for reducing agricultural production risks. While crop insurance is one of the main risk management methods, even larger segments of farmers are outside the insurance program of the government. This may be due to many reasons such as awareness level, risk attitude, accessibility to insurance service of farmers, prevailing production risk, premium level, expected indemnity value, claim settlement process and many others. Several studies show that these factors have direct relation with the farmers' intention of holding insurance scheme. This study aims at analysing the effect of factors related to crop insurance holding intention of farmers. Data was collected from a sample of 109 farmers. Results indicated relation of risk attitude, expected indemnity & claim settlement, accessibility to insurance, awareness level. Insurance awareness has the highest relationship with the crop insurance holding intention. Similarly, insurance awareness, expected indemnity and claim settlement and risk attitude showed positive significant impact with crop insurance holding intention. Production risk and premium level and accessibility of insurance had no influence. This result implies that if awareness level of insurance is increased on farmers, their motivation toward insurance scheme can be increased. Therefore, it can be concluded that insurance program will not be successful until and unless it is supported with awareness building program and making the implementation process simpler and easy. Keywords: Crop insurance, agricultural insurance, farmers, agricultural production, insurance. INTRODUCTION Nepal, with about one-quarter of its population living below the poverty line, is among the world's least developed countries. Agriculture continues to be extremely important in case of Nepal which contributes 24.26% to national GDP (Statista 2021) and 69% of labor force are involved in agriculture in 2017 (CIA World Factbook, 2020). Majority of the Nepalese population lives in rural areas and are depended on agriculture for their livelihood. The processing of agricultural products, including pulses, jute, sugar cane, tobacco, and grain, is mainly involved in industrial activity. The development of the nation is depending on development of the agriculture sector in the country. Agriculture is not only the source of bread and butter but a major source of raw materials to the agro-based industries in Nepal. Agriculture sector contributes more than 60% to the total national export (CBS, 2014). The country possesses 28.75 % in 2016 of agricultural land, according to the World Bank. Similarly, 29.73% in 2010 of land was agricultural irrigated land. As such, the