Onitsha farmers complain of inability to access loans

Farmers in Onitsha, Anambra State said that it is very difficult to secure bank loans for agriculture which is affecting their business.

They said it is disheartening that all their efforts to access loan facilities from both government and non- governmental financial institutions were unsuccessful and frustrating as the financial institutions kept giving them one condition or the other to obtain the facilities and at the end of the day, their applications would not scale through.

Some of the farmers who spoke to SEV, including Philip Nnadi, the proprietor of Bright Future Cooperatives and Prince Ogbonna of Farm Life, all based in Onitsha, in separate reactions, expressed disgust over the issue of securing loans from banks.

Nnadi said he applied for a loan facility of about N3 million from the Nigerian Incentive Risk based Sharing system for Agricultural Lending, NISRAL for cow business but nothing tangible came out of it till date.

Nnadi noted that apart from the NISRAL loan, they equally formed a cooperative body and applied for loan from other financial institutions but to no avail, adding that they are suspecting that most financial institutions are not interested in giving loans to farmers, rather, they are focused on big time manufacturers and importers.