ISLAMABAD, Feb 4: Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan (ADBP) has launched the process of revamping and restructuring its operations for making available cost-effective credit to the agriculturists to enable them increase their per acre yield and also marketing out their produce on competitive international environment, bank sources told Dawn on Monday.

The federal minister for finance Shaukat Aziz, in his speech at the agriculture conference held last week, had called for a complete surgery of the bank to make it effective particularly in providing in time agricultural loans to the farming community.

The conference formed three groups, which submitted following recommendations:

Setting up of revolving finance facility, processing and marketing loans for fruit growing areas, provision of overdraft facility, reduction in pre-emtion period, increase in loaning for tractor and agriculture implements.

Besides establishment of crop stability fund to save losses during marketing of crops, dairy and livestock loans have also been recommended to be increased.

The bank has geared up its restructuring exercise for the improvement and fine-tuning of its lending and recovery operations not only to elevate the agricultural productivity but also increase the income generating activity of the agriculturists.

The conference, which was aimed at seeking inputs from the stake-holders regarding operating procedures, identification of problems, credit needs of agriculture sector and new potential areas for agricultural financing has proved to be a successful venture.

An strategic plan has already been initiated for ADBP’s financial operational and organizational restructuring, which includes elimination of extraneous factors, reconstitution of Board and portfolio audit giving diagnostic review to the return on assets and correlating it with the first hand information obtained from the participants of conference and incorporating into a requisite input.

There was a need of making ADBP as a catalyst in development of agriculture sector as emphasized by the federal minister for food and agriculture and governor State Bank of Pakistan.