ACB was established on August 15th 1888.
First: Bank’s purposes and objectives:
1. Carrying out all agricultural loaning and crediting operations (cash and in kind) to all economic sectors (public, cooperative and mixed).
2. Encouraging establishing agricultural cooperatives, especially the multi-purposes ones, of which saving and crediting are main objectives.
3. Encouraging agricultural saving, approving all deposits and carrying out the banking operations required by agricultural cooperatives.
4. Supporting all agricultural projects that lead to promoting agricultural cooperation and economy in Syria, in order to raise and develop the rural areas.
5. Activating small properties and investments and granting special privileges to agricultural cooperatives, as well as, giving them loaning and crediting priorities.
6. Providing agricultural production needs at suitable quantities, qualities and dates.
7. Encouraging agricultural producers to develop better investment of natural agricultural resources such as using mechanization in order to increase land revenue per area unit.
8. Contributing in lands’ improving through encouraging irrigation loans, and changing wide unirrigated areas to irrigated ones.
9. Supervising investment of delivered loans to check projects seriousness and to be sure that they are used in their due purposes.
10. Contributing in accelerating agriculture development rates in Syria, thus contributing to achieving food security.
 
Second: ACB financing policy:
The main purpose for agricultural crediting is to participate in agriculture development through devoting the necessary money. So ACB tasks are directly related to state’s general development plan. This means that coordinating and uniting efforts by ACB and the planning and executing bodies, especially Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform, Ministry of Finance, State Planning Commission and General Union of Peasants, are necessary efforts to be done regularly and effectively to achieve the desired agricultural development.
ACB contributions are concentrated in financing agricultural projects of both cooperative and private sectors. ACB contribution in financing state’s agriculture projects is relatively limited because they are financed by state’s revenues.

It is known that investment in agriculture is very risky because it is affected by environmental conditions uncontrolled by man, so private capital hesitates to invest in agriculture.
Building on the principles and basics of achieving its purposes and objectives, ACB takes into consideration the following points when financing agricultural sector:

• Realizing proportion between banking resources and investments.
• Changing banking credit structure in order to promote production in productive fields.
• Orienting loans to rationalize agricultural production.
• Increasing productivity through both horizontal and vertical expansion.
• Providing debtors with banking services at the minimum possible cost.
• Providing agricultural credit of all kinds and terms according to production plans and facilitating obtaining loans for agriculture projects with the guarantees of the projects themselves.
• Focusing on rationalizing in kind loans more than cash loans.
• Supporting farmers to obtain production inputs and assist them to accumulate investment capitals as a step towards agricultural finance.
• Encouraging producers to develop investment operations of natural agricultural resources in a better way, such as using agricultural mechanization to increase the output per area unit and work productivity.
• Expanding the net of warehousing for agricultural production requirements and agricultural outputs.
• Achieving natural balance between plant production and animal production, increasing animal wealth in the country and focusing on that increase.
• Providing agricultural production inputs at suitable quantities, quality and dates, especially: improved seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, machines and machinery and cows with high rate of milk production. Those requirements are provided through local producers or imported through competent external trade institutions to be shipped, warehoused and distributed.
• Financing agricultural production in the shape of in kind loans whenever that’s possible. Increasing bank’s supervision, before and after delivering the loan, to ensure that it is well used in the due production purposes, and focusing on continuous supervision on developmental loans.
• Supporting cooperative sector in order to overcome disintegration of agricultural property and then to use agricultural mechanization and make benefits of mass production.

In the coming paragraph, we show, by numbers, the bank’s activities:
ACB was established in 1888 with a capital of SP150 millions pursuant to Bank Law NO. 141 of 1970.

Item	2000	2001	2002
Capital	4500	10000	10000
Investments	28504	27782	24731
Loans	8759	7527	6691
Collections	7978	9736	6716
Productions Input Sales	6885	5085	5781
Deposits and current accounts	9957	12102	13264
No. of workers	2293	2293	2693
No. of branshes	106	106	106

Development of loans and investment (million SP)