Administrative report for the small farm credit profitability and repayment project

Final contractor report covers the period 9/77-9/81 The project helped the Dominican Republic"s Secretariat of Agriculture (SEA) and the Banco Agricola develop and implement an inter-institutional system for enterprise budgets. A total of 101 crop enterprise budgets, based on farmer interviews and representing the major crops financed in 8 regions, were prepared. The budgets were eagerly received by bank credit agents and Government personnel. Although the budgeting system has not yet been integrated into the bank"s operations, it is expected that ultimately credit evaluators will use one of these standard budgets in lieu of farm-specific budgets. Secondly, farm record-keeping was initiated on 10 Dominican farms to provide data with which to judge the validity of the enterprise budgets, which were prepared from single-visit interview data - 48 of the enterprise budgets were produced from the ten farm records and farm record books were maintained as a complementary source of data for budget preparation. Other credit activities carried out during the project included: compilation of a credit policies and procedures manual for the bank; a credit files study, which provided information on procedures and paperwork involved in processing small loans; a loan delinquency study; eight 3-day formal training courses for SEA and bank personnel on the methodology and administration of budgets systems; informal training of bank personnel; and a graduate level seminar on agricultural credit for staff and students associated with the project and other foreign students. In addition, eight occasional papers were published - four papers on farm data collection and analysis, three providing data on the crop enterprise budgets, and one on the farm recordkeeping experiment. In sum, the project demonstrated that reliable enterprise budgets and farm records can be economically produced in LDCs.