Grana Padano-Mps agreement, 500 million credit ceiling for cheese factories

A 500 million plafond is coming to finance the development of the Grana Padano chain. In fact, a cooperation agreement has been signed between Italy's first PDO by value generated (2.18 billion according to the latest Ismea-Qualivita report) and Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena "aimed at strengthening support to associated agricultural and agrifood companies, with the objective of promoting investments, innovation and competitiveness of the Grana Padano PDO cheese supply chain".

The partnership envisages 'the creation of a structured path of activities aimed at fostering sustainable growth in the production of consortium member dairies, with particular attention to the enhancement of access to credit, specialised consultancy, and the development of financial culture'. The credit ceiling reserved by Mps is EUR 500 million and will be active until 31 December 2027. It will be dedicated to the financing of applications received, with a priority channel for preliminary investigations and extremely short credit assessment times.

In essence, dairies will be able to access credit lines to support production and improve production efficiency and sustainability through the guarantee provided by the Grana cheese wheels already in stock.

The investments deriving from access to this 'window',' the Consortium points out, 'will be in addition to the approximately EUR 170 million allocated to four already approved projects of which the Consortium is the leader and which aim to improve the sustainability of the production system. These are NRP funds made available by the fifth call for supply chain contracts. The interventions, some of which are already underway and are expected to be completed by 2028, comply with the Dnsh criteria (Do No Significant Harm to the Environment), a key principle of the European Union for accessing NRP resources.

Entering more specifically into the technical part, Mps will assess the financing requests to the consortium member dairies, aimed at the additional allocation of new production "quota forme". The Consortium, on the other hand, will undertake to define the number of "forma quotas" already held by the consortium member as at 31 December of the previous year, and to confirm that these are fully available and transferable by the latter. It will also guarantee the number of additional "forma quotas" newly assigned to the dairy, which cannot be sold without the prior consent of the Bank that granted the financing. The production reference 'quota shapes', object of the financing, may only be transferred to other cheese factories already authorised to produce Grana Padano PDO.