Small scale farmers at the grassroots in Oyo state have jointly established a microfinance bank to cater for the needs of the poor farmers.
According to the farmers, they came up with the idea of establishing the bank, known as Joint Farmers Microfinance Bank, JFMFB, as a logical step to improving their access to bank loans.
A consultant to the Joint Farmers Micro finance Bank, Mr. Oludare Adesina disclosed that the objective of the bank was to rescue poor farmers in the country from the myriads of problems undermining their productivity.
According to him, most poor or low income farmers could not meet the conditions for loans in conventional banks and the Bank of Agriculture, which has been incapacitating them from developing their farming activities.
“Due to such challenges, we feel that farmers should have their own bank, which will understand their challenges, their grassroots nature, what they are passing through knowing full well that not all farmers especially in the rural areas have bank account.
Most conventional banks in the country today collect 22 to 25 per cent interest and this can never be profitable for the farmers and when they demand for moratorium they will say no,” he explained.
He added: “Even when they take such loans in January they start paying back in February which is not so easy for the farmers. Even if a farmer is into rabbit rearing, the gestation period for a rabbit is 90 days.
This means that if you are giving any farmer loan, there must be reasonable moratorium to market their products.” Adesina also disclosed that the bank has come to add value to agriculture products.
“For example the problem with cassava is the cyanide content and now the bank is planning to extract the water from the cassava, and this will make it last for a long time which will eliminate the panic among cassava growers.”
He said in Ogbomoso for instance, many cashew nuts were wasted every year, adding that the bank was now set to buy all the excess cashew nuts and convert them into powder so that the farmers would not need to sell their cashew nuts in a hurry for the fear of being wasted.
He further explained that it is when cashew is not in the market that the bank would now begin to sell the powder to industries that make fruit juices while the farmers make about 150 per cent profit on their products.