Credit for cultivating Vietnam variety coconut

The Bangladesh Bank has included eight new fields to provide farm loans in its agricultural and rural credit policy programme for the fiscal 2022-23.

The new eight fields are cultivating Vietnamese hybrid coconut, Chinese seed, teen fruit, sugarbit, coffee, sweet corn, seaweed, lobsters and rearing ducks.

The interest rate of the farm loans in the customer level at 8 percent and all kinds of farmers in the rural level will be eligible to get the agri loans, according to the BB’s new farm policy.

The farming of those new items including Vietnam variety coconut and teen fruit are getting very popular now in the country, which prompted the BB to include those in the latest policy for the current fiscal year, said a high official at the central bank.

Robiul Islam, a farmer from Bagerhat, told The Business Post, “This is good news for us as we’ll get farm loans easily to cultivate the Vietnam’s hybrid coconut.”

He said that the local variety coconut trees take a long time to bear fruits but the Vietnamese variety coconut trees take just three years, which is the reason behind the popularity of the Vietnamese variety.

The BB has set Tk 30,911 crore disbursement target for the agriculture sector in the current fiscal year. The target is 8.88 percent higher than the previous fiscal year target.

The farm loans disbursement target was Tk 28,391crore for the last fiscal year. However, the scheduled banks surpassed the target as they disbursed at Tk 28,834 crore to 33,04,811 farmers,  as per the BB data.

From this fiscal year, a group of farmers will get farm loans jointly, as per the new farm credit policy of the central bank. The BB also increased the credit limit per acre for crop cultivation.

The BB also asked banks to settle the loans proposal from farmers within ten working days and to disburse the minimum 60 percent of the total targeted farm loans in the crops sector; 10 percent in fisheries sector and 10 percent in livestock sector.