President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has provided N550 billion in financing to the Bank of Agriculture for the Renewed Hope Smallholder Support and Value Chain Programme as well as to provide a Guaranteed Minimum Price for farmers' produce.

A breakdown shows that N250 billion was provided to the bank to finance smallholder farmers using technology and proper controls, while another N300 billion was given to the bank to stabilise food prices.

The Managing Director of BoA, Ayotunde Sotinrin, who disclosed this yesterday during an interactive session with agricultural correspondents, said the bank does not work directly with farmers, saying it finances them through farmer aggregation companies like AFEX, ThriveAgric, Arziki Noma, among others. The model, according to him, is more efficient and reduces recovery risk.

On the issue of the Guaranteed Minimum Price, he said the bank was saddled with the responsibility of ensuring that food prices do not go above a certain limit, saying with the financing provided by the President, the bank is able to buy produce from farmers during harvest and then release it to the market to stabilise prices.

He revealed that under the pilot phase, about 500,000 farmers have so far been supported, adding that the bank used 4 per cent of the entire financing to insure the programme to ensure the bank does not incur losses in the event of weather-related eventualities.

Speaking on how the bank is financing smallholder farmers, he said they have fully digitised the entire process with the introduction of a new bank card for the farmers, adding that with the wallet system, government can load fertiliser, seeds and other farm inputs onto the farmers' wallets, with which farmers can redeem the inputs at collection centres using a POS.

The MD also revealed that the bank has introduced Know Your Farmer (KYF), saying they now use AI to automate payments and track transactions to aggregation companies, removing the manual checking of millions of farmers' accounts.

Speaking on the need for the reforms, Sotinrin revealed that when he took over about a year ago, the bank was operating like a government department with obsolete facilities, and there was a need to restructure, recapitalise and refocus on its mission.

He stated that the key challenge was financing 70 million smallholder farmers, saying there is nowhere in the world where such numbers of farmers are financed, which was why they decided to finance through farmer aggregators.

Speaking on the Ginger Revitalisation Programme, Sotinrin revealed that about 4,000 farmers affected by ginger blight disease were provided with disease-free ginger rhizomes, saying for every one bag given, farmers return three bags, which are taken to tissue culture labs to produce millions of disease-free seedlings.

He said the bank's goal was to move ginger production from 500,000 tonnes to 5 million tonnes, and revenue from $200 million to $2 billion, adding that they also plan to expand ginger farming to other states and not just the traditional Kaduna, Nasarawa and Plateau states.

On the issue of mechanisation, he said the bank was not distributing tractors to farmers but to service providers who are expected to repay the loans through their income. He said their target is to deploy 2,000 tractors to provide mechanisation services to 1.2 million farmers.

To reduce post-harvest losses, he said the bank was introducing cargo e-tricycles that can carry 2,000–3,000kg, powered by batteries, to move produce