SBP asks banks to finance small farmers

KARACHI: Banks need to explore financing all clusters of agriculture, with particular focus on reaching out to small farmers, State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Executive Director Syed Samar Hasnain said.
He was addressing a seminar on ‘Agricultural Value Chain Financing’ held at the central bank’s premises on Monday.
Hasnain encouraged the banks to use innovative credit methodologies such as value chain financing to reach out to small farmers.
Referring to the importance of value chain financing, he said that the SBP has been working to create an ecosystem for supporting such innovative models. He mentioned about SBP’s support to the pilots of a few banks in financing the value chains of sugarcane, potato, and aqua-culture.
He highlighted the SBP’s strategy of working closely with the banking and agriculture sectors for meeting the growing demand of agri-credit in the country. He appreciated the efforts of the banks which have already achieved 58 percent of the annual target of Rs500 billion for agri-credit disbursements in the first eight months of the current fiscal year 2014-15.