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From Okwe Obi, Abuja
The Federal Government, through the Bank of Agriculture (BOA), has provided N550 billion in financing farmers under the Renewed Hope Smallholder Support and Value Chain scheme.
BOA Manager Director, Ayotunde Sotinrin, who addressed journalists yesterday in Abuja, explained that the support is also to provide what he called a Guaranteed Minimum Price for produce.
Sotinrin explained that N250 billion out of the N550 billion was provided to the bank to finance smallholder farmers, while N300 billion was given to the BOA to stabilise food prices for local consumption.
Also, he explained that the Guaranteed Minimum Price, which the BOA was saddled with the onus of ensuring that food prices do not go above a certain limit, is financed by the President.
According to him, under the pilot phase, about 500,000 farmers have been supported, and that the bank used 4% of the entire financing to insure the scheme to ensure the bank does not incur losses in the event of weather-related eventualities.
Sotinrin further stated that BOA had introduced Know Your Farmer (KYF), as the bank now adopt AI to automate payments and track transactions to aggregation companies, removing bottlenecks in scrutinizing millions of farmers’ accounts.
On the ginger revitalisation initiative, the managing director, remarked that about 4,000 farmers affected by ginger diseases got disease-free ginger rhizomes, adding that for every one bag given, farmers return three bags, which are taken to tissue culture labs to produce millions of disease-free seedlings.
“BOA is moving from the old BOA to ‘Bank of Agriculture 2.0’, “Our focus is financing, technology, and solving foundational problems. We are not a charity. We create impact through profitable and sustainable financing,” he added.
