Minh Tam
Vegetables and fruits meeting VietGap standards are among the products selected for HCMC's market stabilization program this year. - Photo: Minh Tam
This year’s program will start tomorrow and be financed with the loans that are more than four times higher than last year’s program.
Nguyen Hoang Minh, deputy director of the State Bank of Vietnam’s HCMC branch, said among the eight banks, the Vietnam Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Agribank), Vietnam Export Import Bank (Eximbank), Saigon Thuong tin Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Sacombank), Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BIDV) and Vietnam Bank for Industry and Trade (Vietinbank) had joined the program since last year. Newcomers are the Military Bank (MB), Dong A Bank and Housing Development Bank (HD Bank).
Participating enterprises of the program would get short-term loans with an annual interest rate of 6% and long-term loans with 8-10%, Minh said.
Minh said last year’s price stabilization program generated many benefits for the lenders, including the opportunities for brand building, expanding relations with corporate borrowers, helping stabilize product prices and rein in inflation in HCMC. This was why more banks wanted to join this year, he added.
According to the HCMC Department of Industry and Trade, the loans with soft interest rates are on offer for not only product producers and suppliers of the program but also related entities, including husbandry farms and vegetable cooperatives.
This year, the program has attracted 64 entities, or five more than the number of last year. With their own capital and the loans from the banks, participating enterprises will have to prepare the goods volumes that are 20-30% higher than those of last year and account for 20-60% of the city’s demand.
The department also said more efforts would be made to distribute the products of agricultural cooperatives and those items produced in accordance with the Vietnamese Good Agriculture Practice (VietGap) standards and Global Good Agriculture Practice (GlobalGap) criteria so as to provide consumers with qualified products at reasonable prices.
The program will last until March 31, 2015.
The program was initiated by the HCMC People’s Committee in 2002.
In the first years, participating enterprises of the program got interest-free funds from the city’s budget to stabilize prices of essential food items during the Lunar New Year, or Tet. Later, more products were added and the program ran for a longer period, from early April a year to the end of March of next year.
Banks started to take part in the program last year by lending to the participants at soft interest rates.
Up to now, 50 cities and provinces across the country have carried out a similar market stabilization program.
Đăng ký: VietNam News
