By Gabriel Ewepu

ABUJA- THE Managing Director, MD, and Chief Executive Officer, CEO, Bank of Agriculture BoA, Ayodeji Sotinrin, Friday, disclosed that the bank is financing 500,000 farmers and targets 2 million more in order to boost food production.

Sotinrin made this known while speaking on the sideline of the inauguration of the Board of Director of the bank in Abuja by the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Senator Abubakar Kyari, and the Chairman of the newly inaugurated board is Muhammad Babangida, and expressed optimism that with the new board in place they will bring together all the thought leadership expected within the sector and ensure that food insecurity becomes a thing of the past and Nigeria becomes a major net exporter of food.

He also clarified that the bank does not distribute farm inputs as some Nigerians are asserting, but finance the agricultural sector.

He said: “We are financing half a million farmers. We are going to catalyze over 2 million farmers. This is not distribution of input but financing agriculture the right way. A lot of the media sensational news that we have seen. We are hearing distribution, we are a bank, and we don’t distribute inputs.

“We are financing to solve problems of access to finance and also cost of finance. We are still doing single digits. We also have the National Agriculture Mechanization Programme, which is 2,000 tractors with 2,000 mechanization service providers to service 1.2 million farmers and 1.2 million hectares of land. So these are the programmes that Mr. President, in his own thinking, believes can solve problems of food insecurity in Nigeria and also turn Nigeria to a larger exporter of food.”

Meanwhile, he assured that the real farmers will get the loan facility, and the bank has deployed technology to ensure the real farmers are the ones who have the access to the loan facilities.

“It is a very simple thing. We have digitized all our processes and we have imported the right original farmers. We can even publish their names. You can go check their farms, crops that they produce, gone are those days where you have political farmers or fake farmers. I mean, there is no point because you have digital tools to use to know who the farmer is, to also get coordinates of his farm where you can track and show us what he’s doing.”

He also disclosed that the Bank has “engaged over 10,000 extension workers across the country to train them in different economic practices. We have hired a consortium of M&E companies to ensure when these farm aggregation companies collect the facility, when they buy the inputs and they give it to the farmers, they trace them from input collection all the way to harvest.

“So, this is not, I mean, those days are way over. People essentialize these things but, I mean, we’re in 2026, we don’t and can’t do that.

According to the BoA boss, the condition for the loans for farmers is very simple, as he said, “The condition for the loan is to be a farmer. There is no any difficult process, as long as you are a farmer, you can prove that you have farmed before, you have land.

“A typical farmer has between 0.5 hectares to maybe 3 hectares of land. Most of them, on average, have one hectare of land, and we are focused on one very important thing, which is improving the yields, which is increasing productivity because at the end of the day, if we farm 5 million hectares of land and we keep getting 5 million tonnes of food, we are doing serious injustice to the money we’re collecting from government.

“But if we get them, if we give them improved seedlings and better blends of fertilizer, we can get up to five tonnes per hectare, which is what we are trying out now. We are giving them seeds that can get up to five tonnes per hectare. It means with the same 5 million hectares, we can get 25 million tonnes of food. So food insecurity, importation will be a thing of the past.

On getting farmers pay back the loans he said, “You don’t expect the Bank of Agriculture to be chasing 5 million farmers. Mr. President said we need to move away from 100,000 farmers, 120,000 farmers, to actually giving facilities to 5 million farmers. There’s no way, so we are using technology, working with these companies to ensure that we are getting all our money back.”

He also said currently farmers are enjoying better pricing with the policy of the Tinubu-led administration through the BoA.

“This is the first time in the history of this country where the President would actually listen to the price of a farmer based on losses in import parity of grains, where grains prices are lower than the cost of production.

“This is the first time where we would have a guaranteed minimum price mechanism being rolled out in Nigeria, and what it means in simple terms is any farmer in Nigeria who has produced food, especially staple crops, we have the financing to buy it off the farmer. If the prices are too low, we give them increased prices.”