Agricultural credit cooperatives, China's main source of rural financing, issued 193.3 billion yuan (U.S.-$23.4 billion) in new farm loans in the first nine months of the year, up 27.8 percent from the same period a year ago, the government says.
In keeping with policies to boost support for the long-neglected farm sector, small loans to farmers accounted for 80 percent of total new loans.
Although the cooperatives have cut overall nonperforming loans by 6 percent in the first nine months of the year, their bad debts still totaled 463 billion yuan (U.S.-$56 billion). The same bad debts represented 23 percent of the total outstanding loans of two trillion yuan (U.S.-242 billion).
Deposits on the agricultural credit cooperatives totaled 2.9 trillion yuan (U.S.-$351 billion) through the end of September.