Recently, the Department of Agriculture of the Almaty Region conducted a procurement of services for expertise, analysis, and verification of documentation totalling over 600 million tenge. The editorial board of the FBRK decided to learn more about the details of the procurement.
In May 2024, the department published two lots for the procurement of services of an authorised agent under the state programme for lending to regional budgets, with the aim of scaling up the project to increase rural incomes.
In other words, the state institution was looking for a specialist to oversee the process of budget lending to subjects of the agro-industrial complex (AIC).
The cost of the first lot is about 174 million tenge. In this case, the client allocated 7 billion tenge for budget lending.
The funds were intended to be directed towards creating new or expanding existing dairy farms, poultry farms for meat production, as well as supporting projects in irrigated agriculture using modern water-saving technologies.
The cost of the second lot is more than 438 million tenge. About 17.6 billion tenge was allocated for budget financing of projects using private household plots for crop production, livestock farming, and poultry farming, including those outside populated areas.
Financing also extended to projects for the development of private entrepreneurship, particularly in rural areas.
The supplier was given 12 months to utilise the budget loans.
According to the technical specification, the provider could be a bank or an organisation whose controlling stake belongs to the state or a national holding company.
Simply put, the Department of Agriculture of the Almaty Region is willing to spend over half a billion tenge solely on the services of an authorised agent to conduct expertise, analysis, and verification of documents submitted under the state programme for farmers.
This time, the procurement, conducted, incidentally, from a single source, did not take place: the invited supplier did not submit a response to participate within the established timeframe.
However, it is possible that the department will yet make another attempt to repeat such a generous procurement.