Two banks, Unity Bank plc and Oceanic Bank International plc gave the divergent views at the Business Roundtable session of the First Northern Agricultural summit held in Kaduna.

The Executive Director of Unity Bank, Alhaji Lamis Dikko observed that financing agriculture had been beneficial to the bank. According to him, lending especially to small scale farmers had been less risky with more than 90 % of loan repayment recorded. He however added that it had not been effective with large scale farmers or commercial farmers.

Dikko attributed the success to the fact that the bank always dealt with farmers in groups or as cooperatives.

"When you deal with farmers groups, you will get up to 90% loan repayment', he said

He said with over 20 years of managing credit to farmers in the north, it was realized that the small holder farmers had the lowest default record while large scale farmers had proved to be bad risk. He mentioned Kebbi, Katsina, Kaduna and Bauchi as the states, where the bank recorded success working with cooperative groups.

But the Executive Director of oceanic bank, Mr Charles Mekwunye disagreed. He said experience of many banks in financing the agriculture was not encouraging. Notwithstanding, Oceanic bank had in the last two and half years funded Notore with over N10 billion for the development of agriculture in the country, he said. Notore acquired the defunct NAFCON, Onne under the federal government privatsation programme. The company planned to introduce its products be in market by September. He said the bank has increased its branches in the north from 44 to 88 post consolidation and wasintroducing mobile banking aimed at extending banking services to the rural areas.

He said part of the bank's strategy to support agriculture local farmers, Oceanic Bank had introduced easy save account to enable small scale farmers access loans.

Both banks however urged the government to expedite action on the land reforms, explaining that f farmers need to have title to the farms to allow them get access to loans as they would serve as collateral.