Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Provincial Supporting Funds for Development in Agriculture Sector (SFDA): Evidence from North Khorasan Province

Regarding to the undeniable importance of the effectiveness of the provincial supporting funds for development in agriculture (SFDA) in rural and agricultural development, present study aimed at this importance with the case study of North Khorasan province's SFDA. For this purpose in order to data gathering, designed questionnaires were distributed among whole SFDA members and experts in private (rural) and public sector of each agricultural sub-sectors of North Khorasan province (N=66). Also, the Delphi technique, structural equation modeling (SEM) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) were applied for data analyzing. Results indicated that the farming and horticulture subsectors (20.17%) and aquaculture (0.18%) have the most and least share in capital and dedicated loans of SFDA, respectively. In addition, findings of Delphi showed that there are 31 sub-criteria in 4 groups for evaluating the effectiveness of SFDA activities which they include economic, social, production and training-skill. Results of SEM indicated that assessed criteria and sub-criteria are statistically significant. Results of evaluating and ranking of SFDA effectiveness by AHP indicated that SFDA effectiveness in “economic” activities is appropriate, in “social” activities is medium, in “production” and “training-skill” activities isn't appropriate. Also, between economic sub-criteria "lending inexpensive loans", between social sub-criteria "increasing producers bargaining with banks and financial and credit institutions", between production sub-criteria "providing production inputs on time" and finally between training-skill sub-criteria "fixing and developing previous occupations by training", have the most priority of effectiveness.