KULOB, March 31, 2009, Asia-Plus — Since the beginning of the year, seven banks and two microlending organizations have provided totaling 444,669 somoni in loans to farming units in four cotton-growing districts of Khatlon’s Kulob region for this year’s cotton sowing and harvesting campaign.
Over the same period of last year, 40,035,527 somoni were provided to cotton farmers in the Kulob region and some 12 million somoni of this amount were provided to them in February-March 2008.
“Last year, we were made provide loans without appropriate execution of documents in order not to hamper the sowing campaign,” said the source at one of banks in Kulob, “This year, loan allocations have been reduced 30 times but the sowing campaign is not only going on but it is even progressing from day to day.”
According to the Kulob regional agriculture directorate, 33,000 hectares of lands in the Kulob region have been allotted this year for growing cotton and 10 percent of them have already been sown.
This discrepancy – lack of loans and high pace of the sowing campaign – has forced some local bankers to begin taking of insincerity of debtor cotton farmers. “This means that they have money but do not want to repay their debts,” one of bankers said.
The deputy head of the Kulob branch of Tojik Sodirot Bonk (TSB) in charge of agrarian sector, Sayfullo Abdulvvahobov, said that delays in repaying debts had disastrous effects for debtors. “In accordance with agreements concluded between banks and farming units, the penalty interest on the outstanding debt is 0.2 percent per day,” Abdulvvahobov said.
