President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Thursday announced three loan packages for farmers, including the Farmer Support Loan, Agricultural SME Loan and Agricultural Debt Transfer Loan, the limits of which range from TL 250,000 ($13,323) to TL 15 million ($799,416) with maturities to vary from 36 to 120 months.
Speaking at the Ziraat Bank Agricultural Ecosystem Meeting, Erdoğan said that the support loan, which will be provided by Ziraat Bank will be allocated up to TL 250,000 per person with an annual interest rate of 9.75% and a 36-month maturity period.
The president commented that every global crisis “reminds us how strategic food production and supply is.” Stating that the interruption of grain shipments due to the Russia-Ukraine crisis poses the threat of hunger around the world, Erdoğan said: "Türkiye has brought humanity back from the brink of a major crisis by enabling a resumption of grain shipment via successful diplomacy. This also showed the importance of our own agricultural production capacity.”
Erdoğan also said that they will soon implement a regulation, as part of the credit-support program, that will enable Ziraat Participation, an Islamic finance bank in Türkiye, to provide low-cost financial assistance for farmers.
Treasury and Finance Minister Nureddin Nebati, also speaking at the program, stated that they are increasing agricultural support day by day, noting, “We allocated TL 54 billion for agricultural assistance to our farmers in 2023, with an increase of 109% compared to the initial budget of last year.”
Nebati who also said that the global pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war clearly showed all countries how strategically important the agricultural sector is, noted that in 2022, they increased the agricultural support budget by 54% taking into account the rise in global commodity prices, compared to the initial budget. “We provided TL 3.1 billion of diesel support and TL 1.9 billion of fertilizer support to our farmers,” the minister said.
Ziraat Bank General Manager Alpaslan Çakar, for his part, said that climate change, the pandemic, problems in the supply chain, the war between Russia and Ukraine once again showed that it is vitally important to ensure the sustainability of healthy and reliable food supply, and for this aim, the development and strengthening of agricultural production.
In line with this perspective and sustainable financing strategies, Çakar said they increased their agricultural loans from TL 109 billion to TL 232 billion in 2022.
