China's rural cooperative financial institutions played a vital role in providing financial services to farmers in 2010, China's banking regulator said on Monday.
The institutions' outstanding loans to farmers hit 2 trillion yuan (304.88 billion U.S. dollars) last year, accounting for 78 percent of such loans issued by the country's banking system, the China Banking Regulatory Commission said in a statement on its website.
The rural cooperative financial institutions helped boost agricultural output, increase the income of farmers, promote rural economic development and manage inflationary expectations, the statement said.
Further, the nation's rural cooperative institutions issued 782.5 billion yuan of new loans to the rural sector last year, accounting for 29.7 percent of the total agricultural loans from the country's banks.
As of the end of last year, China had 2,954 rural cooperative financial institutions with 75,856 outlets, whose total assets exceeded 10 trillion yuan.
