CBN TO GIVE FARMERS ADDITIONAL N450BN LOAN

ABUJA-The Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, has said it would provide an additional N450billion loan to the agricultural sector, just as the apex bank targets credit facilitaties to 3.8million farmers by 2020.

The CBN hopes to achieve the N450billion bank lending to farmers through the Nigerian Incentive-based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending, NIRSAL.

NIRSAL is an initiative which the CBN recently completed to provide a one jacket lending to Nigerian farmers.

Mallam Sanusi Lamido, CBN governor, revealed this at the opening of a two-day conference on 'Financing Agricultural Value Chain in Sub-Saharan Africa',  organised by Union Bank of Nigeria, in partnership with International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropic, ICRISAT, in Abuja yesterday.

Sanusi said the window had four concrete and transparent measures of success, including generating an additional N450billion of bank lending within 10 years by de-risking the agricultural value chain.