President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. celebrated his 67th birthday on 13 September by launching in Guimba, Nueva Ecija the Agri-Puhunan at Pantawid Program (APPP) that provides local farmers access to agricultural credit and benefits.
The APPP also aims to ensure the regular planting of rice on 1.2 million hectares of farmlands covered by the Department of Agriculture (DA) program.
According to Municipal Agriculturist Nida Lanuza, the president chose Guimba to launch the program as the town has the biggest farmland in the province of around 15,514 hectares.
The APPP credit facility allows farmers to pay for seedlings, fertilizers, pesticides, oil and services from machineries and drones.
Qualified for the said program are farmers who are listed in the Registry System for Basic Sectors in Agriculture, has a farmland two hectares or less, no outstanding loans from formal lenders or from the DA Agricultural Credit Policy Council, no negative findings and completed the technical training for rice planting.
Each beneficiary will have a maximum credit limit of P60,000 for each hectare of land every planting season wherein P28,000 per hectare will be used for the production of rice and input credit, while the remaining P32,000 will be used for subsistence allowance.
The loan term is 180 days or until the end of the planting season, with an interest rate of two percent per annum.
According to DA Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr., each beneficiary will receive Interventions Monitoring Card (IMC) that will serve as an electronic wallet that farmer beneficiaries can use to get their interventions through DA-accredited merchants.
The IMC can also be used through automated teller machines, online banking and banks.
The DA aims to distribute these IMCs to more than 5,000 farmers in Central Luzon this September.