TEHRAN – Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture hosted a ceremony on Saturday for unveiling the country’s first agricultural business training program (called NABKA).

NABKA, which has been prepared by the Agricultural and Natural Resources Engineering Organization of Iran (ANREOI) in collaboration with ICCIMA and some other private institutions, is going to offer agribusiness training courses to the companies, businessmen, farmers and those active in the country’s agricultural sector.

The unveiling ceremony was attended by senior officials from different organizations and private institutions including Ali Salehabadi, the managing director of Export Development Bank of Iran (EDBI), Mohammad Khazaei, the secretary-general of Iranian committee of International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), Shahrokh Ramezan-Nejad, the head of the Agricultural and Natural Resources Engineering Organization of Iran, and Ali Shariati Moqadam, the head of ICCIMA Agricultural Committee, as well as Alireza Kordlou, secretary of the national working group on commercial agriculture.

During the ceremony, several panels were held, in which numerous officials delivered their speeches on the issues pertaining to the mentioned program as well as agricultural-related subjects.

The agribusiness program (NABKA)

At the beginning of the program Alireza Kordlou, who is the executive secretary of the program, made a short introduction about the program and explained some of NABKA’s key features.

According to the official in a transition through traditional systems to the modern mechanical and commercial systems, the agriculture sector requires an intermediary body, and NABKA is going to be this intermediary body which helps the companies, businessmen, farmers and related bodies to be equipped with the necessary knowledge for completion of the mentioned transition.

He noted that NABKA is aimed to offer agribusiness training in five different levels which would cover various aspects of international agribusiness and trade, including packing and printing, quality control, marketing, exports, promotion and etc.

The ICCIMA capacities

Elsewhere in the ceremony, Ali Shariati Moaqadam delivered his speech, in which he called on the country’s businessmen and entrepreneurs active in the field of agriculture to have more close communication with ICCIMA for developing the agriculture sector.

He mentioned the chamber’s huge capacities and capabilities for supporting the country’s agriculture sector and noted that such training courses could realize a great part of these capacities.

Shariati Moqadam further noted that NABKA is going to offer training courses in five different levels during which various specialized areas like international business, commercial marketing and etc. will be covered.

A step toward institutional capacity building

Further in the event, the secretary-general of the Iranian committee at the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) underlined the great potentials of this program and stressed the necessity of such training courses in order for capacity building in the country’s agricultural sector.

Khazaei expressed his committee’s readiness for offering all-out support in the implementation of the mentioned program, saying that “As the representative of the ICC, we will have the necessary cooperation with ICCIMA and other involved bodies to make sure that this program will be implemented at its best.”

He also noted that using the communicative capacity of ICC, his representative office in Tehran could communicate with other ICC members and transfer their knowledge and experiences in the field of agriculture into the mentioned training courses.

EDBI to fully support NABKA

Finally, in another section of the ceremony, Ali Salehabadi, head of the country’s Exports Development Bank, delivered his speech in which he expressed his bank’s readiness to fully support the program and to offer insights over monetary, finance and banking-related issues in these courses.

Emphasizing the important role that such training courses could play in improving the country’s non-oil exports, Salehabadi said: “In the current situation [the U.S. sanctions on the oil sector] the government should be mainly focused on the development of non-oil exports, and such programs could be of great help in this regard.”

He mentioned the EDBI’s financial supports for development of the non-oil exports and said in the past Iranian calendar year (March 2018-March 2019) EDBI allocated eight trillion rials (about $190 million) for financing export-related projects and in the first nine months of the current year (March 21-December 21, 2019) more than nine trillion rials (about $214 million) has been financed in this regard.

“Capacity building in the agriculture sector is going to lead to the development of sustainable non-oil exports, and we should take necessary measures to make that happen,” he said.

EF/MA

Photo: Mohammad Khazaei, the secretary-general of the Iranian committee of International Chamber of Commerce (4thR) and Ali Salehabadi, the managing director of the Export Development Bank of Iran (3rdR) attend a ceremony for unveiling Iran’s 1st agricultural business training program (called NABKA) on Saturday in Tehran.