Thanks to an alliance between the Secretariat of Agriculture of the department of Antioquia and the Agricultural Financing Fund (Finagro), as of today, $ 500,000 million is made available to small producers in the region for credits with a subsidized rate of 0.3%.
In an interview with LR, the Secretary of Agriculture of Antioquia, Rodolfo Correa, stressed that the money will be used to finance small productive projects and productive rural housing.
How was this allocation of $ 500 billion in agricultural credit achieved?
The departmental government of Antioquia signed an alliance with Finagro. The Government contributed $ 11,254 million to subsidize the interest rate of rural loans. Those $ 11,254 million are enough to subsidize $ 500,000 million, which are allocated by Finagro exclusively for Antioqueño peasants so that they can receive loans at a rate of 0.36% per month.
What will be the final destination of the money?
Any interested peasant from Antioquia can go to any bank and ask about that line of credit and it will offer him the credit at a subsidized rate until we exhaust the figure of $ 500,000 million that goes for two lines. The first is the financing of small productive projects. There we are talking about $ 15 million per hectare and the second line will be for the financing of productive rural housing projects where the maximum is one house and one hectare.
How many people are going to benefit from these credits?
The project will benefit 31,000 people, who will be located in all the municipalities of Antioquia. From the presentation of their status as inhabitant of the department they will be able to access these resources. As it is a small loan, many guarantees are not needed and in rural housing loans the home itself will be used as a guarantee. We hope to cover 50% of the number of associated producers that the department has.
What strategies are you going to develop so that that money is invested as it should be?
We have an alliance with the municipalities and through the secretaries of agriculture it will be verified that these resources are effectively destined to small producers, productive projects and rural housing.
In addition, we are going to develop an alliance with the department’s commercial banks so that we can carry out a constant monitoring process from the bank and from the Secretariat so that these resources are invested in what is needed.
How is access to credit in the department?
In Antioquia, 70% of the peasants do not have access to credit because the interest rates are extremely high, the cheapest credit available for a peasant today in Colombia is between 1% and 1.5% per month and that for them it is a lot of money, so we want to move to a rate of 0.3% per month, a historical rate.
What is the general panorama of the agricultural sector in the region?
Antioquia went from having a 65% share of the agricultural sector in GDP to having a 5.1% share in 2019. We have to understand that economic reactivation depends on investment in the countryside and those $ 500,000 million seek to reactivate rurality economically, making it profitable and giving farmers the benefits to pay the historical debt that the state has with the country’s rural development.
What are they doing to enhance the productive capacity of the region?
What the departmental government is doing is addressing each of the shortcomings. First, from $ 500,000 million for credit, the endowment of technology for productive associations, a special plan for rural productive road circuits and we have just signed an agreement with the United Nations to create a fairer agricultural marketing system, which limits intermediation that does not add value.
The future of Colombia depends on having a strong rural middle class, that is, a middle class that lives with dignity, with the possibility of access to credit, housing and services.
