The balance of rural support loans in all the country's financial institutions had reached 2,520.9 billion yuan (about 305 billion US dollars) by the end of May, 195.9 billion yuan (23.7 billion US dollars) more than at the year beginning and 62.1 billion over the same period of the previous year, said a senior official with the People's Bank of China, the country's central bank.

"In recent years, the bank has taken financial support for China's rural development as one of its major tasks and put forth a series of policies to promote rural purpose financial service," he said.

As a result, agricultural purpose loans have increased year after year and farmers' difficulty in access to loans has been alleviated to some extent, he said.

"In 2004, financial institutions have continued to increase credit and loan input to further support agriculture," he said.

He said the central bank will allocate a special 5 billion yuan(about 600 million US dollars) of reloans to rural credit cooperatives that have been facing money shortage in main grain areas so as to ensure success in spring ploughing there.

Balance of loans in rural credit cooperatives in the first five months have increased 154.2 billion yuan (about 187 billion US dollars) and over 90 percent of the cooperatives have opened small credit loan service and other services from which some 60 million rural families have benefited.

Source: Xinhua