Many companies in Vietnam's southern region currently lack funds to purchase more agricultural products for export, local newspaper Vietnam Agriculture reported Tuesday.

At present, the companies want to buy larger amounts of winter- spring rice, cashew nuts and pepper, which are in harvest seasons in the southern region and key export items of Vietnam, but they cannot access bigger bank loans.

According to banks' regulations, exporters now cannot borrow more than 70 percent of the value of their assets mortgaged at the banks.

If the Southern Food Corporation mortgages all of its assets worth some 1,000 billion Vietnamese dong (nearly 62.9 million U.S. dollars), it will access a loan capable of buying only 200,000 tons of rice, and there are now thick supplies of winter-spring rice in the southern Mekong delta, said the corporation's deputy general director Nguyen Tien Dung.

Many local rice and cashew exporters, especially those with limited financial capacity, want banks to offer them bigger loans, said the report.

Vietnam exported over 1 billion U.S. dollars worth of farm and forestry products in the first two months of this year, surging 58. 3 percent over the same period last year, according to the Trade Information Center under the Vietnamese Trade Ministry.

The country earned 671.3 million dollars from shipping farm products abroad in January and February, a year-on-year rise of 36 percent. Meanwhile, its forestry product export turnovers doubled to 377.4 million dollars.

Vietnam has targeted to export over 7.3 billion dollars worth of farm, forest and fishery products in 2006, up from nearly 6.9 billion dollars in 2005, the center said.

Source: Xinhua