The Ministry of Agriculture has asked the National Economic Empowerment Fund (Neef) to station its officers in each agriculture extension planning area (EPA) for easy distribution of agricultural loans.
Neef is providing the loans to small-scale farmers across the country.
Agriculture Deputy Minister Benedicto Chambo told The Daily Times that this would help ensure that farmers were getting the inputs in good time, ready for the next planting season.
“Farm input loans by Neef are a huge programme of the [President Lazarus] Chakwera administration. They have the potential to, if well implemented, turn around our agricultural sector.
“This year, the programme was delayed due to some factors which were beyond our control. But we cannot repeat the same [mistake and] that is why we want Neef to use our existing offices to start verification of loan applications so that by August this year, the inputs should be in EPAs, ready for collection by farmers,” he said.
Chambo said the ministry would also engage with the Ministry of Trade to prepare farm gate prices and possible markets for this year’s produce to ensure that farmers are not ripped of their produce by unscrupulous vendors.
On his part, Neef Chief Executive Officer Humphrey Mdyetseni said the arrangement would give them an opportunity to easily network and reach out to farmers quickly.
“We will definitely work with these frameworks because they are giving us an opportunity to easily monitor what our clients are doing with the input loans,” he said
Mdyetseni said Neef had set aside K150 billion for input loans with hopes that the funds would be topped up during the forthcoming meeting of the National Assembly.
Currently, Mdyetseni said agricultural loan utilisation by farmers is at over K40 billion, with the figure expected to increase when all the farmers that have applied for the loan access fertiliser.
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