The Central Bank of Nigeria has recovered over N400bn out of about N600bn it lent to farmers in its Commercial Agriculture Credit Scheme.
The Director, Development Finance Department, CBN, Philip Yusuf, disclosed this during a virtual seminar organised by the bank for financial journalists.
Beneficiaries of the scheme aimed at enhancing large scale farming across Nigeria included private and public sector players in the agricultural value chain.
The CBN director said the intervention was aimed at supporting the Federal Government’s quest for food security, especially with the border closure and the lockdown that came with the Coronavirus Disease.
Yusuf said, “The CACS is really to fast-track food processing across the entire value chain and this has been our successful intervention.
“We’ve disbursed over N600bn and over N400bn has been paid back. It was given at nine per cent interest rate, but the interest rate has been reduced to five per cent.
“Private sector players and also state governments have accessed it for either rice processing mills, cassava processing mills or to do large scale farming,” he said.
Speaking on the need for the country to be self-sufficient, he said, “Because of the protectionist mode that a lot of countries are going into, there’s an opportunity for us to properly diversify into agriculture.
“So, we need to produce more, especially grains. We need to achieve national food security and we need to be able to start looking at how we can even begin to export for us to be able to earn forex, because there’s already a decline in the major forex inflow we get from oil.
“We really need to start looking at how we can ensure we have food self-sufficiency and also begin to export to earn more foreign exchange. We have significant land that has been unlocked and so we need also to ensure we are doing a lot of processing in-country.”
