Half of CBN’s Anchor Borrower Programme beneficiaries, not farmers – Stakeholder

The Chairman of Harvest Feeds Agro Processing Company, Goke Adeyemi has alleged that half of those who benefitted from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Anchor Borrowers Program (ABP) were not real farmers.

Adeyemi who backed the decision of President Bola Tinubu to recover the loans using the anti-graft agencies, said when the loans are recovered the government can then give them out to real farmers to invest in agriculture.

In his words, “Nigeria’s agriculture still needs a lot of encouragement, investment, determination and commitment not only from the government but especially from the citizens of the country.”

The agro processor said the ABP which according to him is a nice initiative has several pitfalls but could be modified in order to achieve the purpose it was established for.

“The Anchor Borrowers program was a nice initiative when it came on board, however, there were a lot of pitfalls in the implementation, several individuals who are not farmers became beneficiaries of agriculture funding, leaving out the real agro practitioners, those who are in the real farming, I can tell that half of those that benefited from the ABP were not real farmers, they were either pseudo farmers, agent farmers or contractor farmers.

“We know that there were a lot of challenges like flooding in some places and ravaging of farms due to conflicts between herders and farmers, but we can also have a lot of mitigations because some of those farms were insured, they would have probably recovered their losses.

“I support the recovery of the funds from ABP so that it can also be given to other farmers because there are millions of farmers all over Nigeria, so if people benefited from the loan, they should repay it so that other farmers can also benefit from it, it can be a recycling fund, and in less than 10 years, things would have changed in the agriculture sector”, he said.

He also called on the government to involve the key players in the agricultural sector in the implementation of the modified ABP in order to achieve a seamless execution of the program.

“The program is a very good initiative, we can also have a modification of it, maybe it can go directly from commercial banks instead of the Central Bank or and agriculture-focused bank. They should also try and use the established players in the agriculture sector as the real front to implement the program”, Adeyemi added.