Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Adewumi Adesina has appealed to farmers in the country to form cooperative societies in order to enable them benefit from federal government inputs and credit facilities.
Adesina said this in Lokoja yesterday during a two-day workshop on financial linkage services for rural farmers in North Central zone of the country.
The minister, who was represented by the North Central regional director in the ministry, Engineer Sunday Oduma Edibo, posited that the workshop was to sensitise farmers in the north central geo-political zone of the country on the need to form cooperative groups in order for them to access credit facilities from financial institutions as well as government.
Explaining further, he said they were encouraging farmers to form cooperative societies because it was a long commodity value chain, saying the problem of not being able to access loan by farmers was being looked into by the minister so as to be able to get money they needed during farming season.
“We have assembled commercial banks, bank of agriculture and micro finance banks that will come to the aid of the farmers. Banks have seen that farmers always pay back their loans, hence they are now willing to assist,” he said
Speaking in the same vein, Mr M. Azeez, a director in the Department of Rural Development in the ministry, stressed that the workshop was aimed at establishing linkages between micro finance institutions, formal and informal financing institutions in order to create viable and sustained rural finance system.
A resource person at the workshop, Dr. Sunday Ichado said the idea of cooperatives was to enable farmers have access to administrative facilities from the government and financial institutions.
He said forming cooperative societies would help farmers to eliminate difficulties in getting money to hire labourers, get inputs and be able to transport their products to market.