POTENTIALS AND CHALLENGES OF COMMUNITY BANKS IN AGRIBUSINESS FINANCING FOR SMALL FARMERS IN JOS SOUTH LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF PLATEAU STATE

Capital is regarded as a major factor for expanding production and modernizing Agriculture. The need to provide it to farmers is inevitable because it is an instrument in fostering Agricultural development and for improving efficiency in the production process. The contemporary practice of agriculture requires capital support, which is a handicap to small farmers. A research was conducted in Jos South L.G.A to assess the effectiveness of rural credit delivery system of community banks to provide resources to poor farmers. A set of 65 data collection instruments was administered to farmers and bank officials in a multi-stage random selection technique. Descriptive statistics was adopted to analyse socio-economic characteristics of the farmers while inferential statistics was adopted to test the hypotheses of the study. Findings revealed that majority of the farmers are yet to benefit from community banks (88%). The result of the hypotheses test indicates that information gap, inadequate and timely supply of inputs of production, time of loan disbursement, value of loan package are all statistically significant to sourcing of credit from the bank by farmers. It is recommended that farmer friendly banking policy be adopted to encourage farmers to patronize community banks.