Johannesburg - The Land Bank had made significant strides to promote agriculture in South Africa, despite facing some challenges, chief executive Petrus Nchocho said in an interview.
The rise of emerging farmers, a shortage of staff to reach farmers in the rural parts of the country and the drought were some of the challenges the Land Bank had to grapple with.
The Land Bank is a statutory organisation with a mandate from the government to support the development of the agricultural sector.
Nchocho said only 10 percent of its loan book was allocated to emerging farmers. “How do we ensure that emerging farmers get more access so that we can grow them?”
He said the Land Bank’s loan book had grown from R14 billion to R40bn in just six years.
Nchocho said he believed the Land Bank had not failed emerging farmers.
“We come from a zero base. There was nothing for emerging farmers when we started in 2010. At least now we can say R4bn of the loan book has gone to support the emerging farmers. We would like to do more for them in the future.”
The biggest portion of the loan book still went to established commercial farmers, who received the remaining 90 percent, he said.
The other challenge facing the bank was having a small staff and it became difficult to reach “every corner of the country”.
“We have 400 people employed by the bank throughout the country. It is difficult to reach everyone and that is why we rely on other agricultural organisations like Grain SA to reach people in grain growing areas by working together with their offices to help the farmers,” Nchocho said.
The bank has 25 offices spread all over the country.
Drought had held the agriculture sector back, he said.
“We estimate that 30 percent of the land was not planted in the last summer. So we lost quite a bit of the expected production in that regard. The country is short of between 3 million to 4 million tons of maize. This means we must import the shortfall because planting less meant that we were always to have lower yield.”
The Land Bank had managed to raise finance through international organisations such as the World Bank, where R1.3bn has been made available.
“The African Development Bank has come through with R500 million and we have just concluded a R5bn long-term facility with the Public Investment Corporation. We have the capital to undertake the projects now,” he said.
BUSINESS REPORT