ISLAMABAD: State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) in collaboration with other financial institutions had launched Warehouse Receipt (WHR) Program for post-harvest financing to ensure easy access to credit for growers in the country.
Besides, the projects would enable the growers for enhancing the storage capacity in the country to get proper rate of return of their produces.
The other objectives of project was to safeguard the farmers, particularly the small-scale growers form the exploitation of middleman and to ensure proper rate of return to enhance farmer’s income, said WHR Project Head, Kamran Buxi.
He said this while addressing a 2-day International Conference on “Innovative Agriculture Financing” here on Wednesday.
The conference was jointly organized by State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (FAO) with an aim to discuss innovative strategies and solutions to increase outreach of agriculture credit to small-scale farmers.
The event also highlighted opportunities for corporate farming and agriculture-food enterprise in the country, besides sharing the international best practices to promote the sector.
Buxi informed that the WHR pilot project was introduced in Punjab and Sindh provinces while it would be extended across the country to develop the storage infrastructure. He said that the SBP WHR project has start working in Khairpur Sindh as it was evolved by taking the foreign experts on board for ensuring the transparency and success of the scheme.
He said that the Bank has also introduced several measures for safeguarding the farmers from the exploitation of middleman and their easy access to credit for purchasing inputs.
SBP official said that the Central Bank has also encouraged other financial institutions for providing easy loan for the development of commodity storage capacity. He said that independent collateral managers would be appointed and farmers would use the receipt as a grantee for acquiring loans from the banks for their feature business activities.
Addressing the conference the speakers highlighted the issues and challenges faced by the local agriculture sector including access to easy credit, availability of quality inputs like seeds and pesticides.
They said that there were over 8.2 million farmers out of them only 2 million farmers have the facility of easy credit where as remaining were forced to get costly loan. The conference also suggested the remedial measures to overcome these challenges and put the agri-sector on fast track development to enhance farms income.
The official of First Micro Finance Bank informed that the institution was working to convert the agri-tube wells to solar energy for the promotion of green energy in the country.
He said that there were about 1,084,905 tube wells in the country out of which 77 percent was operating on diesel where as 23 percent was on electricity.
