Brasília – The Bank of Brazil (BB) plans to finance the 2011/2012 crop by making available around 45.7 billion Brazilian reals (US$ 29.1 billion) in rural credit operations. In the announcement made on Thursday (7), the institution informed that the value is 17% greater than in the previous cycle. Family farming should receive 10.5 billion reals (US$ 6.7 billion), whereas 35.2 billion reals (US$ 22.5 billion) will be made available for family farming and rural cooperatives, with 20% and 16% increases, respectively, as against the last crop.
In the 2010/2011 crop, disbursements reached 39 billion reals (US$ 25 billion), of the total 42 billion reals (US$ 26.8 billion) made available. According to the Agribusiness and Micro and Small Company vice president at the BB, Osmar Dias, agencies have been developing credit operations for new crop since July 1st and several measures have been taken to grant greater speed to the disbursement of funds. In the 2011/2012 Agriculture and Livestock plan, the federal government announced the disbursement of 123 billion Brazilian reals (US$ 78.5 billion) for Brazilian agriculture.
“We are going to spread portfolios specialized in rural credit in several agencies, we trained 1,600 employees to speed up the process and are going to adopt the rotating criteria, with lower cost to producers and greater availability of credit,” explained Dias.
Apart from that, he informed that around 40,000 farmers who were not able to pay their bank financing due to debts contracted during the crisis in 2008 have been rehabilitated to get credit. Dias pointed out that the BB is the largest agriculture financer in the world.
*Translated by Mark Ament
