Business Briefs
ALIYU Abdulhameed, managing director, Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System Plc, NIRSAL, has said that the agency has facilitated over N105 billion in public and private financing options across the pre-upstream, upstream, midstream and downstream segments of the agricultural value chain. He said the purpose of the funds was to boost the sector.
He said the funding has had a profound positive socio-economic consequence, resulting in the creation of over 400,000 jobs as well as impacting two million lives. He also said the agency’s support for the 2020 wet season farming activities under the Central Bank of Nigeria’s, CBN, Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, ABP, would significantly increase farm yields and improves livelihoods in states within the North-central.
The affected states: Nasarawa, Niger, Kogi, and Benue are expected to witness bumper harvest in rice, maize, cassava, sesame, and soybean even as NIRSAL confirmed the structuring of farmers in the FCT into 16 established Agro Geo-Cooperatives (AGCs), 12 of which are included in the ABP for the wet season 2020.
Speaking during a meeting with farmers in the FCT, Abdulhameed said NIRSAL would continue to prioritise farmers’ needs, not just in the implementation of the CBN’s ABP, but also in the development and delivery of frameworks that would further open the banking sector to agriculture as well as ensure that farmers get the best of inputs at the right times and locations for their production purposes.
This came as the agriculture risk assessment agency also disclosed that it had linked 926 FCT farmers cultivating 1,140 hectares of land with guaranteed off-take markets thereby protecting them from price fluctuations as well as the exploitative tendencies of some middlemen.
– Jul. 31, 2020 @ 15:19 GMT |
Tags: NIRSAL facilitates N105bn financing to boost agriculture
