Maravi

Daka bemoans high bank interest rates

COMMENT - If the government taxed the mines for over a billion dollars a year, they would not be borrowing from commercial banks, and they would have money left to lend to entrepreneurs and consumers, without charging usurious interest rates.

Daka bemoans high bank interest rates
By Edwin Mbulo in Livingstone
Thu 08 Apr. 2010, 04:00 CAT

MINISTER of agriculture Peter Daka says the high interest rates are disadvantaging most small-scale farmers. And Daka says the time of talking about poverty reduction must be done away with but there must be action on wealth creation.

During the opening of the Southern Africa Regional and Food Security Forum at the Zambezi Sun Hotels in Livingstone yesterday Daka said that for a long time, agriculture had been perceived as a government affair.

“Please allow me to digress a little bit from President Rupiah Banda’s speech. What saddens the government is that interest rates by our banks are high. How will a small-scale farmer manage with these high interest rates? My challenge for us all is how to stimulate the small-scale farmers and private partnerships. We need to weigh the pro’s and con’s a peasant farmer needs to graduate to commercial farming, the sweat of a peasant farmer is only felt by the middle man,” he said.

“The interest rates are just too high, it is soup costing more than the meat. When a peasant farmer grows maize he only adds 25 per cent on the 50 kilogrammes of maize but when the miller buys the maize he sales it at over K200,000 who is benefiting? As politicians and government we are not pleased. I’m on this side today as a politician but tomorrow I will be on the other side in the village, things we talk about must be implemented, let us be practical. Today you must find solutions to tomorrows world,” he said.

He added that Africa and the SADC region had supported the farmers through the fertiliser support programmes but with little results.

“The SADC and Africa will not come out of this quagmire. There is so much high interest rates. We have fertiliser support in all the SADC countries but what have we achieved? Agriculture has been a sleeping giant for too long. Let us now talk of wealth creation and not poverty reduction, agriculture is a sleeping giant it needs to be awaken,” he said.

And livestock minister Bradford Machila says that the biggest challenge facing the agricultural sector was how the peasant farmer gets his produce to the market.

“If we don’t work on the feeder roads the peasant farmer will not get the produce to the market. I hope the outcome of this forum will help us address these issues,” he said.

Labels: BANKING, LENDING RATES, PETER DAKA

posted by MrK @ 2:41 PM