ISLAMABAD: Finance Minister Senator Ishaq Dar has said that the government places high priority to the development of country’s agriculture sector due to its strong linkages with other sectors of economy, and its high significance in ensuring food security, reducing poverty, and generating widespread prosperity.
Senator Ishaq Dar was speaking while inaugurating a two-day international conference on innovative agriculture financing jointly organised by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and Food and Agriculture Organisation of United Nations (FAO) in Islamabad. The conference aims to discuss innovative strategies and solutions to increase outreach of agriculture credit to small-scale farmers, and also highlight opportunities for corporate farming and agriculture-food enterprise.
He said the government was taking measures to increase agriculture production and infrastructure, ensure food security, and promote pro-poor agricultural growth. These measures will help to improve production yields, introduce modern farm-mechanization, increase better market access, and integrate farming with diverse markets through value chains to ensure that the benefits are passed down to farmers.
Sikandar Hayat Khan Bosan, Federal Minister for National Food Security and Research, who co-chaired the inaugural session, while appreciating the steps taken by SBP to promote agriculture financing, stated that focus on sustainable agriculture was imperative to meet the increasing food demand of a growing population worldwide. He emphasized that the large scale prosperity could not be accomplished without channelizing resources including financial services for the benefit of smallholder farmers. He hoped that innovative thinking and knowledge exchange through such forums can help in bringing working solutions to long-held issues of farmers’ low access to financing.
State Bank of Pakistan Governor Ashraf Mahmood Wathra in his keynote address shared SBP’s policy framework for enhancing the flow of financial services to rural agriculture sector. Wathra, while asserting the importance of agriculture for the country, mentioned that access to finance was critical to rural-agriculture developments. He said the changing times were giving birth to newer financial-inclusion challenges which demand a divorce from conventional and traditional approaches and a marriage with newer, better and more innovative ways of doing business.
He shared SBP’s vision and strategy for creating an enabling environment for enhancing agriculture credit and highlighted that the industry had so far performed well against ambitious growth benchmarks. Wathra also said that SBP encourages and supports innovation. The SBP is striving to introduce internationally renowned practices such as value chain financing and warehouse receipt financing in the country. Wathra hoped that this conference would provide an impetus to the government of Pakistan and SBP’s efforts for nurturing an eco-system which was conducive for the growth and development of agriculture financing.
In his address, Patrick T Evans, FAO Representative to Pakistan, said it was vital to introduce agriculture value chain finance and other innovations into the banking sector and in building technical capacity to scale up its use and implement across the country”.
The inaugural session was followed by plenary, ‘breakout’ and ‘plug & play’ sessions where in moderators and panellists deliberated on a variety of topics including disaster management, farmers financial literacy, use of information and technology and alternate delivery channels for financial inclusion, promotion of Islamic-based modes of financing and cluster development. Additional features of the conference included stalls to by different agri-allied stakeholders including financial institutions, development finance institutions, and agri-technology promoters.
