ACC provides 500 weather impacted farmers with JD4m financing

AMMAN — The Agriculture Credit Corporation (ACC) has provided JD4 million financing for 500 farmers that were impacted by the severe cold front, dubbed “The Dragon”, which hit the Kingdom in the beginning of March.

The storm, followed shortly by the COVID-19 crisis, caused damage to the plastic houses of over 1,800 farmers in the Jordan Valley area,  ACC General Director Mohammad Hayari told The Jordan Times on Wednesday.

The corporation continued providing farmers with loans during the pandemic, securing the necessary funding for their agricultural projects in order to ensure their production season continues by helping the farmers fix the damage that impacted their crops, according to Hayari.

He added that the funding was provided after authority was delegated to managers of the corporation’s different branches in areas that were impacted by the storm, which helped simplify measures and expedite decision taking.

Hayari commended the efforts of the Agriculture Ministry and the committees that inspected the damage, which conducted field surveys of the affected projects, and then provided the ACC with the final infomation. The corporation continues to receive loan applications from farmers whose names were listed in the statements, he added.

The general manager also highlighted the importance of coordination and cooperation with all the concerned official entities during the curfew period due to the coronavirus, especially the Department of Land and Survey and the Jordan Valley Authority, which he said had helped expedite measures to disburse loans to impacted farmers.

The Central Bank of Jordan’s “speedy decision” to allocate JD10 million contributed in supporting the ACC’s liquidity under the exceptional circumstances that it faced, Hayari said, noting that this in turn helped farmers to continue producing crops, “which reflected positively on Jordanians and the national economy in general”.

The corporation has shouldered the responsibility of paying all interest on the loans instead of the farmers, which Hayari said reflects its role in supporting the agricultural sector, and will continue to do so within the new priorities imposed by the current exceptional circumstances.

Farmers in the Jordan Valley at the time of the storm sustained “severe damage to their greenhouses and crops” due to gusts that reached a speed of 120 kilometres per hour, representatives of the sector had told The Jordan Times eralier.