Credit to agriculture. Global and regional trends 2013–2022
21/12/2023
Access to formal credit is critical to farmers for purchasing inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, plant protection materials or animal feed. In the absence of personal savings, borrowing from informal sources (such as moneylenders, relatives and friends) may involve unduly high interest rates and unfavourable conditions, which may make many agricultural operations uneconomical. The lack of access to credit is particularly problematic for farmers as there is a gap between the time that money is spent on cultivating crops or raising livestock, and the time money is made from the sale of the products.
Credit to agriculture measures the amount of loans and advances given by the banking sector to farmers, to rural households, to agricultural cooperatives or to any agri-related businesses. Each country’s central bank compiles its credit stocks by economic activities as part of their monetary and financial statistics publications via annual or quarterly reports online. Data collection has been carried out mostly through reports found on the central bank websites
FAOSTAT provides countries's data information about the established concepts of credit and lending institutions and the composition of total credit of each country’s financial statistics to help users better understand the source data. FAOSTAT provides credit data series from 1991 to 2022 for over 130 countries.
