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A Radical Journal
of Geography
Depleted by Debt: “Green”
Microfinance, Over-Indebtedness,
and Social Reproduction in Climate-
Vulnerable Cambodia
Vincent Guermond
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK,
vincent.guermond@rhul.ac.uk
Dalia Iskander
UCL Anthropology, University College London, London, UK
S
ebastien Michiels
Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) / Centre de recherche en
economie et
statistique (CREST), ENSAE Paris, L’Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Paris, France
Katherine Brickell
Department of Geography, King’s College London, London, UK
Gr
ainne Fay
Senior Research Executive, Accent MR, London, UK
Long Ly Vouch
Independent Researcher, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Nithya Natarajan
Department of International Development, King’s College London, London, UK
Laurie Parsons
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
Fiorella Picchioni
Natural Resources Institute (NRI), University of Greenwich, Chatham, UK
W. Nathan Green
Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Antipode Vol. 0 No. 0 2023 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 1–23 doi: 10.1111/anti.12969
Ó2023 The Authors. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract: The operations of microfinance are exalted in mainstream development
thinking as a key means of supporting smallholder farmers facing growing crises of agri-
cultural productivity in the context of daily, ongoing, and often slow-onset climate
disasters. Microfinance products and services are claimed to enhance coping and adap-
tative capacity by facilitating both risk recovery and reduction. Challenging the status
quo, this paper brings together original and mixed-method data collected between
2020 and 2022 in Cambodia to critically examine the “green finance”agenda by
highlighting the ways in which microfinance contributes to reproducing and exacerbat-
ing climate precarity and harm for many. We evidence how credit-taking can lead to
more dangerous and individualised efforts to cope with, and adapt to, existing condi-
tions at home, often at the cost of emotional and bodily depletion. By doing so, we
contribute to answering calls for connecting literatures and thinking on social reproduc-
tion, depletion, and climate change adaptation.
Keywords: green microfinance, depletion, social reproduction, climate change adapta-
tion, Cambodia
Introduction
The idea that microfinance can be used as an instrument of adaptation to climate
and environmental change has come to the fore in development policy circles in
the last decade. In an abridged version of a report commissioned by the Grameen
Foundation and Oxfam US, economist Asif Dowla (2017:78) argues that “within
the populations that will be most affected by global warming, the plight of many
individuals is linked to the ability of microfinance institutions to adapt to the con-
sequences of climate change”. A study by the World Bank-housed Consultative
Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) shows how international funders who had com-
mitted US$56 billion for financial inclusion in 2020 considered green/climate
finance to be one of the main priorities for financial inclusion in the next five
years (Tolzmann 2022).
1
At the heart of this new discourse lies the promise that
already-existing and newly-adapted financial products and services including
credit, insurance, remittances, and savings can help the poor reduce their vulnera-
bility to, and better recover from, climate-related shocks as well as slow-onset
disasters. Dowla (2017:78) goes so far as to argue that climate change “opens up
opportunities for the microfinance institutions and their clients”.
In recent years, a set of new and apparently improved products, programmes,
and strategies have been developed that specifically enable microfinance institu-
tions to further facilitate adaptation in two key ways: “by (1) improving ex-post
[after the event] risk recovery by enhancing coping capacity; and (2) improving
ex-ante [before the event] risk reduction by enhancing adaptive capacity”(Fenton
et al. 2017:193).
2
However, for financial inclusion proponents, many of the exist-
ing actions of microfinance institutions do already “automatically reduce vulnera-
bility to climate risk”even when active steps are not taken (Agrawala and
Carraro 2010:9). They suggest that people and communities who have access to
existing microfinance are better placed to diversify their livelihoods, spread risk,
and build assets (Rippey 2009; Scheyvens 2015). Microfinance is considered well-
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placed to fill what is commonly called the “adaptation deficit”—that is, the
“shortage of adaptive capacity that a household has because of its lack of capital
in its various forms”(Scheyvens 2015:vii). Microfinance, the argument goes, con-
stitutes a unique conduit to channel climate finance resources at the sub-national
level (Agrawala and Carraro 2010; CIF 2018).
These new developments constitute a nascent and less-addressed part of the
broader green finance agenda. Where the commodification of carbon tends to
dominate critical literature on green finance (see, for example, Bracking 2018;
Bridge et al. 2020; Buller 2022), the redeployment of microfinance as a tool of cli-
mate adaptation speaks to a broadening of green finance towards addressing the
impacts of climate change by incorporating affected people into global financial
circuits. A critical body of literature has demonstrated how financial products and
services such as micro-insurance and micro-credit promote a type of climate
adaptation in climate-precarious agrarian settings infused with neoliberal logics,
resulting in individualised, decentralised, and incremental solutions, geared
towards the further integration of populations into processes of capital accumula-
tion (Felli 2021; Johnson 2013). By being urged to become climate adaptable via
microfinance products in the face of climate-related shocks and disasters, struc-
tural climate vulnerabilities are not addressed and, instead, borrowers’capacity to
navigate and survive ordinary climate crises is recast as profitable investment
opportunities (Joseph 2013; Sealey-Huggins 2017). Microfinance thus contributes
to the further extension of the market and can even lead to increased and/or new
risks and maladaptive outcomes via, among other things, over-indebtedness and
exposure to market fluctuations (Fenton et al. 2017; Green 2022a; Jordan 2020;
M€
uller et al. 2017; Taylor 2015).
Through examining original data from rural Cambodia, we caution against
microfinance for climate adaptation becoming modus operandi. The Southeast
Asian country provides an important evidence base for this. Foreign direct
investment has flooded into Cambodia’s microfinance industry for nearly three
decades, driven as much by processes of financialisation and neoliberal eco-
nomic policy, as by development priorities. In its early stage of commercialisa-
tion in the late 1990s, the industry received hundreds of millions of dollars in
concessional loans, grants, and equity investments from large development
finance institutions, including the International Finance Corporation, French
Development Agency, KfW Development Bank, and Asian Development Bank. As
these large development finance institutions entered the market, they provided
the confidence and co-financing to attract private investors. As such, the indus-
try became a major destination for private funds managed by microfinance
investment vehicles (Bevacqua 2017). By 2016, Cambodia received more than
10% of all global microfinance investment vehicle investments, the most in the
world (Symbiotics 2017).
Against this backdrop—and with rice farming becoming more expensive, more
unpredictable, and increasingly vulnerable to floods, droughts, and rising temper-
atures (Chhinh and Millington 2015; Lawreniuk and Parsons 2020; Nguyen and
Sean 2021; Sok et al. 2021)—microfinance loans are being taken out in ever-
greater numbers by Cambodian farmers to: finance agricultural production;
Depleted by Debt 3
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diversify their livelihoods; repay other debts; migrate nationally and internation-
ally; and finance social reproduction (e.g. healthcare, food, and home improve-
ments) (Bylander 2014; Green 2022b; Green and Estes 2022; Natarajan
et al. 2019,2021; Seng 2018). The bulk of research revealing the impacts of this
financialised, neoliberal industry in Cambodia has focused on the issue of house-
hold over-indebtedness. Following the 2008 financial crisis, when many house-
holds were hit hard by rising debts and a loss of income, the industry became
increasingly concerned about over-indebtedness as many borrowers began to
default on their loans. Multiple reports (Bliss 2022; Liv 2013; MFC and Good
Return 2017) have highlighted the widespread problem of over-indebtedness, cit-
ing figures of between 22% and 50% of households either already or about to
become so.
3
While climate adaptation-tailored microfinance products are only
slowly emerging in Cambodia, this is likely to change with speed given their pro-
motion in the international development arena and Cambodia’s climate vulnera-
bility. It is therefore of timely importance to take stock of farmers’experiences of
dealing with both unpredictable and erratic weather patterns and microfinance
borrowing.
4
To do this, we pay attention not only to loans that are taken soon after a
climate-related shock to cope, but also to the ways in which farmers deal with cli-
mate events and agriculture loss while being indebted. While providing some
assistance in the short term, this paper demonstrates the growing problem of
over-indebtedness and the harmful set of coping strategies which are used to
repay loans on time. Rather than being the end of the (climate) shock they are
intended to respond to, microfinance loans defer suffering and are often the cata-
lyst for other often harmful coping strategies to ensure repayment, pushing
households to borrow and work more, sacrifice food quality and quantity, erode
and sell their assets, including land, and even quit farming.
The burden of these over-indebted livelihoods is borne by the bodies of bor-
rowers, who face physical and mental depletion as the price of this financia-
lised coping mechanism. Building from conceptual thinking on depletion
through social reproduction (Rai et al. 2014) and calls for connecting depletion
of both the environment and through social reproduction (Rai and Gold-
blatt 2020), this paper calls into question microfinance as a harm-free tool of
climate adaptation. The literature review that follows brings into dialogue these
diverse sets of literature—on climate adaptation and depletion through social
reproduction—for the first time. We then turn to the research methods under-
pinning the data presented later in the paper. Further information is then pro-
vided about the rise of microfinance in Cambodia and the inescapability of
debt among rice farmers in climate-vulnerable rural settings. We subsequently
show through the empirical sections that in the face of overwhelming debts to
repay in an uncertain climate, many farmers have little choice but to adopt
coping strategies which deplete their health and wellbeing. We contend that
such sacrifices ultimately erode borrowers’already-limited resources and under-
mine their capacity to adapt to a changing climate in the longer term. The
conclusion provides final reflections on microfinance as a controversial instru-
ment of climate adaptation.
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Depletion through Social Reproduction
Financial inclusion critiques are part of a larger body of literature that situates the
emergence and consolidation of microfinance in the context of a crisis of social
reproduction in the global South since the 1970s (Federici 2014; Weber 2006).
The retrenchment and dismantling of welfare programmes, the privatisation of
utilities, and the liberalisation of the financial sector among other things rendered
the use of credit, and microcredit, necessary to pay for individuals’and house-
holds’social reproduction (Brickell et al. 2020; Green and Estes 2019; Guermond
et al. 2022; Roberts 2013; Soederberg 2014). In this article, we advance the argu-
ment that this privatisation of social reproduction and climate adaptation via
credit-taking leads to necessary coping strategies and tactics that are physically
and emotionally depleting. Here, depletion is understood as being engendered by
the physical and emotional nature of work and sacrifices that household members
undertake in bearing and repaying debt (Green and Estes 2019,2022; Res 2021).
We take our point of departure from Rai et al. (2011,2014) who consider the
effects of devaluing social reproduction in the market economy. In this context,
the term “depletion”refers to the leaching of these unrecognised resources nec-
essary to perform social reproduction, at rates that outpace “replenishment”.
Without a focus on Depletion through Social Reproduction (DSR), development
policies risk concealing their embodied costs, effectively allowing social reproduc-
tion to subsidise both the market—by suppressing wages—and the state—by
legitimising limited public expenditure on welfare. As a concept, DSR thereby
“studies the structural aspects of social reproduction that undermine the sustain-
ability of everyday life in a given social context”(Rai et al. 2014:89). DSR “pro-
vides a new tool”to capture the effect of this neglect, by capturing the “harm”
inflicted on those who perform social reproduction (Rai et al. 2014:100). In doing
so, it uncovers the extent of this harm, often (but not always) disproportionately
experienced by women, and disguised in the “everyday social economy of indi-
viduals, households and communities”(ibid.).
We pursue DSR first by exploring coping strategies amongst over-indebted
farming households which are having an adverse effect on their physical and
emotional health. These strategies are conceptualised by Rai et al. (2014:91) as
constituting the basis for understanding DSR, whereby such harm represents “a
measurable deterioration in the health and wellbeing of individuals and the sus-
tainability of households and communities”. We extend the concept of DSR to
think about the growing reliance on debt and in the servicing of this debt, the
sacrifice of food quality and quantity, and the erosion and selling of assets (such
as land). We find relatedly that stress and anxiety associated with the labours of
caring for debts (Federici 2014; Roy 2010) and the doing of “life’s work”(Mitch-
ell et al. 2003:415) are leading to emotional depletion amongst farming house-
holds particularly. As we point out in several points in the paper, given that social
reproductive labour tends to burden women more than men, the everyday “sur-
vival work”of money management in Cambodia tends to be a feminised under-
taking (Brickell 2020; Natarajan and Brickell 2022).
Second, we look at how DSR is articulated with climate change. The paper asks
how debt-taking, which has recently emerged as a touted tool of climate
Depleted by Debt 5
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adaptation, serves to deepen the impacts of climate-related events such as floods
and droughts on people’s livelihoods. Again, we achieve this through studying
the everyday. Bee et al. (2015) adopt a feminist lens to argue that climate change
governance, which tends towards techno-managerial, individualised solutions, is
often disassociated from how different subjects experience the everyday impacts
of climate change. They highlight the everyday as a locus of climate impact and
suggest that “cracking open the neoliberal logic of climate change ... requires
careful consideration of how power works through everyday spaces and practices”
(Bee et al. 2015:343). In taking inspiration from their argument, we consider how
one such techno-managerial policy—microfinance—fares as a means of enabling
climate adaptation for farming households. Focusing on participants’quotidian
experiences, we assess DSR through microfinance and debt-taking linked to cli-
mate and environmental shocks and events. Here, wider research on smallholder
agriculture in Cambodia speaks to the rising use of microfinance institutions (MFI)
in such contexts (Green et al. 2023). By questioning how microfinance debt-
taking is linked to the intensification and commodification of agricultural produc-
tion, we examine how climate and environmental risks are being increasingly indi-
vidualised through financial instruments (Bracking 2018).
Methods
This article draws from field research carried out between October 2020 and Feb-
ruary 2022 in three villages in the provinces of Battambang, Prey Veng, and Kam-
pong Cham in Cambodia, as well as in the capital, Phnom Penh. It is part of a
broader research project entitled “Depleted by Debt? Focusing a Gendered Lens
on Climate Resilience, Credit, and Nutrition in Translocal Cambodia and South
India”(https://www.debt-climate-health.org), which examines the relationship
between climate change, debt, health, and nutrition in Cambodia and India. Spe-
cifically, the project probes at the issue of how to ensure that “climate resilience”
through credit provisioning does not come at the cost of borrowers’emotional
and bodily depletion in the context of daily and often slow-onset climate disas-
ters. In the case of two of the participant communities, the research team pos-
sesses a history of collaboration, helping to smooth the introduction of the
research and build on existing trust and understanding. In the case of the third,
this relationship needed to be built afresh, necessitating preliminary visits and
explanation of research goals.
The project’s methodology in Cambodia is anchored in social science methods
and environmental science. First, 621 quantitative household surveys—comple-
mented by 1,161 individual questionnaires—were carried out in the three prov-
inces in three villages with differentiated vulnerabilities to droughts and floods,
and distinctive reliance upon rice-based agriculture. Surveys examined demogra-
phy, household occupations, migratory histories, household assets, and liabilities,
saving, borrowing, and lending practices, as well as experiences of and capacity
to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Second, an environmental profiling of
all three villages was conducted, including primary and secondary GIS data collec-
tion, secondary environmental, climate, and agricultural data collection, semi-
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structured interviews with villagers and local stakeholders, as well as landscape
observation and photography. Third, semi-structured interviews were carried out
in the three villages with 30 households (60 participants overall). For each house-
hold, two members were interviewed, often but not always comprised of the two
spouses. A stratified sample of households was first drawn from the quantitative
household survey, representing different levels of indebtedness. Four households
in each of the five indebtedness strata were then purposively sampled based on
survey data on land ownership, sources of debt, as well as migration trajectories.
Interviews with participants explored the links between debt, nutrition, physical
and emotional health, and climate and environmental change and disasters, with
the aim of giving voice to experiential and subjective interpretations of this debt-
nutrition-health-climate change nexus. Fourth, qualitative interviews were comple-
mented by the nutrition-physical activity quantitative analysis. Each pair was allo-
cated an accelerometer device for a period of six consecutive days, during which
a team of enumerators administered daily time-use and food-intake surveys
(Zanello et al. 2017). Fifth and finally, 39 and 22 interviews were carried out with
local and national stakeholders respectively, in the three villages and in Phnom
Penh. Stakeholders included representatives of local authorities, microfinance insti-
tutions, informal credit providers, health professionals as well as government min-
istries, central and regional development banks, and international financial and
development institutions. Interviews with national stakeholders discussed the links
between microfinance and climate change adaptation, the impacts of COVID-19
on the microfinance sector, and issues of over-indebtedness and land sales, while
interviews with local stakeholders explored broad socio-economic changes in the
villages, the impacts of climate and environmental change on the villagers, and
the various challenges that villagers face regarding debt repayment.
Inevitably, the research process brought challenges, not least COVID-19, which
interrupted research on multiple occasions by forcing stoppage of data collection.
However, the Cambodian context did far better than many peers in this regard,
meaning that research could intermittently continue for this project during the
pandemic. During this time, we naturally were very aware to take health and
safety precautions. The challenge of capturing all villagers in the survey itself was
also notable. The need to construct survey logistics according to the demands of
complex working schedules across agricultural seasons proved difficult, necessitat-
ing a high level of knowledge around the local economy, and trust building to
understand who is absent and why.
To facilitate this trust, all interviews except those with national stakeholders
were conducted in Khmer by some of the researchers as well as a local Cambo-
dian research assistant and a team of local enumerators. Interviews were later
transcribed into English. Given the sensitive and political nature of microfinance
indebtedness in Cambodia, all participants were provided informed consent, and
participants were told that interviews could be ceased at any time if they felt
uncomfortable. The names of all villagers have been changed to protect their
identities, and no locations are specifically disclosed (we refer to Villages A, B, and
C). As for local and national stakeholders who did not wish to be identified,
names and organisations have also been anonymised.
Depleted by Debt 7
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Rice Farming, Climate Change, and Microfinance in
Rural Cambodia
Rice farming has been and continues to be a crucial livelihood activity for many
households in rural Cambodia. While a large part of the population has diversified
their livelihoods and generally become less dependent on farming, fishing, or for-
estry activities (Marschke 2017), many households still rely upon rice farming to
eat and/or generate income. In the three study villages upon which this article
focuses, rice-farming households represent between a quarter and a half of all sur-
veyed households.
5
As a middle-income, traditionally agrarian nation highly
dependent on rice monoculture (NIS and MAFF 2015), Cambodia has long been
recognised as acutely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The overall
temperature of the region has increased by 0.9°C since 1960 (World Bank 2022),
while livelihoods exposure to heat, floods, and droughts are rising rapidly. Cam-
bodia now experiences 46 more very hot days—defined as days where the maxi-
mum temperature exceeds 40°C or is more than 5°C above the monthly average
—every year compared to the 1960 baseline (World Bank 2022). Especially prob-
lematic for farmers, rainfall patterns have shifted substantially over the last hun-
dred years, with the traditional bi-modal pattern of wet season rainfall (heavy in
May and September, less so in between) having all but disappeared by the 1990s
and been replaced by a less predictable mono-modal pattern (Diepart 2015).
While fluctuations to the Southeast Asian Monsoon—a subsystem of the East
Asian Monsoon—create high levels of variability in climatic conditions, the inci-
dences of flood and drought have steadily increased. The early 2000s exhibited a
pattern of “alternating floods and droughts”for five years consecutively. Not only
this, but the 2016 drought was declared by the Cambodia Prime Minister to be
the “worst natural disaster to hit Cambodia in 100 years”(Save the
Children 2016:3).
At the provincial level, major floods in Battambang impacted 20% and 45% of
the total cultivating areas in 2011 and 2013 respectively. Damage to rice cultiva-
tion has occurred more frequently since 2014, with between 20% and 30% of
the total cultivated areas being impacted in 2015, 2016, and 2019 due to
droughts and floods. In Kampong Cham and Prey Veng, while major floods in
2011 and 2014 impacted between 10% and 20% of the overall cultivated areas,
recent severe and moderate droughts occurred in 2018 and 2019. Importantly,
the environmental profiling carried out primarily between October 2020 and
December 2021 shows that, over the last decade, patterns of rice damage at the
provincial level have followed patterns of floods and droughts in the three study
villages. For instance, records show that droughts have been frequent in recent
years in Village C. Farmers also complained about rice being damaged by floods
due to uneven seasonal flooding and poorly designed infrastructure development.
Interviews with farmers from Village A in January 2021 indicated that rice cultiva-
tion had been damaged by a combination of very unusual heavy rains during the
harvest in November 2020 and ineffective drainage systems.
As a result of a wider “conjuncture”of agrarian change (Li 2014), with climate
change an important driver, Cambodian farmers have risen to these latest chal-
lenges and shifted their practices substantially. The exodus of younger rural
8Antipode
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inhabitants to the “modern”sector, catalysed by the garment sector’s skyrocket-
ing expansion from a few thousand workers in the early 1990s to three-quarters
of a million by 2018 (ILO 2018), has drastically reduced the rural labour supply.
At the same time, farmers have become increasingly dependent on capitalist mar-
kets for producing and consuming commodities, including rice (Green 2022c).
This combination of reduced rural labour supply and growing dependence on
capitalist markets with the growing unpredictability of rainfall has contributed to
the almost nationwide transition from labour-intensive transplanting methods
(requiring 30 person-days per hectare), to more capital-intensive methods of
farming (requiring only two person-days per hectare) (Liese et al. 2014). The lat-
ter needs substantial investment in seeds, fertiliser, pesticide, machine rental, and
irrigation (Liese et al. 2014). This latest adaptation to climatic and political-
economic conditions is a work around of sorts to the problems facing Cambodian
farmers. Yet the money to farm in this way has to be found from somewhere. In
recent years, that somewhere has increasingly been commercialised microfinance.
Hailed as a “tremendous success”(World Bank 2009:1) by the World Bank as
long ago as 2009, microfinance provision as a tool for rural development and risk
reduction has been part of the Cambodian government’s strategic adaptation
planning since 2013 (RGC 2013), contributing to exponential growth in the sec-
tor. In a country that had practically no banking services in the early 1990s, the
industry now provides micro and small loans to 3.06 million borrowers out of the
country’s 16.9 million people (CMA-NIX 2022), the majority of whom are in rural
areas. In the past two decades, the industry’s total micro- and small-loan portfolio
grew from $98 million in 2004 to more than $16.4 billion today, equivalent to
approximately 60% of the country’s gross domestic product (CMA-NIX 2022;
Green and Bylander 2021). In 2021, the average micro- or small-loan size was
$4,280, greater than 95% of all incomes in the country (Equitable Cambodia and
LICADHO 2021).
6
Alongside the overall percentage of households borrowing
from the microfinance industry, Cambodia has been ranked as the most microfi-
nance saturated country in the world, an outlier even among other countries with
large microfinance industries (MIMOSA 2020).
Our study corroborates this as data suggest farming households are taking on
increasing amounts of debt. In fact, the household survey indicates that farming
households in all three study villages are significantly more indebted than non-
farming households. 61% and 35% of participants in farming-only households
and in households that do farming alongside other types of economic activities
(respectively) reported a major increase in their use of credit for agriculture com-
pared to 10 years ago. The household indebtedness ratio—or total outstanding
debt to total disposable income ratio—for farming-only households was 181%
compared to 139% and 118% for farming households relying on other economic
activities and non-farming households respectively (see Table 1).
7
Our data shows that in addition to taking loans to invest in agriculture, diversify
their livelihoods, repay other debts, migrate, and finance social reproduction
needs, many farmers were taking on debt to cope with the aftermath of a
climate-related shock, including repaying other debts as well as covering social
reproduction needs. Across the three villages, 12.2% of surveyed participants said
Depleted by Debt 9
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the last time they borrowed from a microfinance institution was partly to deal
with climate-related agriculture loss. For instance, Kunthea’s household income
mostly comes from her and her husband farming rice three times a year. Follow-
ing a bad harvest caused by pests and a heatwave, Kunthea and her husband
Bunroeun, residents of Village A, decided to take out a microfinance loan partly
to repay other debts, notably their supplier who provided them with farming
equipment and fertilisers: “I lost a lot of my production. That is why I borrowed
from the bank”(Kunthea, Village A, qualitative interview).
Other farmers attempted to manage their debt payment liabilities in other
ways. Da, another farmer in Village A, said that one of the reasons her household
started to cultivate rice three times a year was because of the many debts they
had to repay. The problem, Da explained, is that because they “continuously
farm”, they don’t have time to dry the ground. She said that this makes the rice
more prone to disease (plong) and can lead to production loss. Here, microfinance
repayment pressures contribute to push farmers like Da to work the land more,
making farming an even riskier endeavour: “Because we have a lot of debt to
cover, we must try to do more”.
Depletion through Debt Repayment
As described above, following a poor or failed harvest due to increasingly erratic
weather patterns, many farmers we spoke to said they either had to take out new
loans or struggled to repay existing ones. Two or three bad harvests in a row
could lead to even more dire consequences. With high levels of debt taken on to
bolster household production and social reproduction, research participants typi-
cally did not achieve repaying debt in full. Rather, most were in a state of continu-
ally paying debt with no realistic debt-free time in the future that they were
working towards (Adkins 2017). In what follows, we show how instead of helping
indebted borrowers to cope with and recover from climate-related shocks such as
droughts and floods, microfinance loans were usually the catalyst for participants
having to adopt harmful coping strategies to service debt. Specifically, facing
both frequent bad/failed harvests and debt-repayment problems, individuals and
households felt they had little choice but to work and borrow more, sacrifice food
quality and quantity, erode and sell assets, and consider quitting farming. We
Table 1: Average outstanding debt per occupation and household indebtedness ratio in
the three study villages (indebted households only)
Average total
debt (formal and informal)—
HH
level ($)
Household
indebtedness
ratio (%)
Non-farm indebted households (n =218) 2,399 118
Indebted households who farm alongside
other economic activities (n =94)
3,355 139
Farming-only households (n =93) 2,883 181
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show how each sacrifice came with a set of unduly high and ongoing costs,
borne by the bodies of borrowers, who suffered physical and mental depletion as
a result of servicing so much debt—the epitome of over-indebtedness
(Schicks 2013).
Working and Borrowing More
The main challenge [farmers] are facing, I think, is debt. Most take loans for farming
[but] the problem is rice yields are not stable from year to year. Farmers cannot settle
their debts. Farmers pay back the interest monthly and pay the principal back only
once they harvest. [When they cannot settle the debt], they sometimes get a loan
from other institutions to pay back the current one. (MFI Branch Manager, Village C)
As the MFI Branch Manager above attests, when struggling to repay their loans,
particularly in the face of a bad or failed harvest, many farmers reported having
“no choice”but to take out further loans to service existing debts. As farmer Vibol
put it, they just “don’t know what else to do”. In fact, across the three villages,
12.5% and 9.1% of surveyed indebted participants said the last time they bor-
rowed from a microfinance institution and an informal moneylender respectively
was partly to repay other loans (see also Bylander 2015; Green et al. 2023;
Res 2021).
As noted above, Kunthea and her husband (Village A) decided to take a loan
following a climate-related shock. They explained how the extra income that was
required to repay their debt every month meant that their daughter in Phnom
Penh had to work longer shifts in a garment factory:
It is difficult for my daughter; she does not have enough time to rest as she needs to
work overtime at the factory until 10pm. It is challenging for her too. (Bunroeun,
Village A, qualitative interview)
Like Kunthea and Bunroeun, several participants said that members of their
households had to take up additional—often physically demanding—jobs to be
able to repay their debts while others had to continue working against their doc-
tors’recommendations due to debts they owed microfinance institutions.
Still unable to keep up with payments, Kunthea and Bunroen ended up borrow-
ing from local moneylenders to be able to repay their microfinance loan. This is
despite some informal moneylenders—especially luy roab or daily lenders—charg-
ing the highest interest rates (on average five times higher than microfinance
institutions in all three study villages), making them the source of borrowing par-
ticipants most wanted to avoid. When converted to an annual percentage rate,
the true cost of borrowing from private money lenders could amount to up to
200%. Although the share of debt that rural Cambodians owe money lenders
declined from 11.8% in 2014 to 4.4% in 2019/20 (NIS 2020), this is likely attrib-
uted to the simultaneous dramatic growth of microfinance loans. Senior execu-
tives of some of the microfinance institutions interviewed called for the regulation
or even ban of such moneylenders, with one MFI CEO suggesting that their orga-
nisation was the real “victims”of such loan sharks. However, our data shows that
Depleted by Debt 11
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rather than being mutually exclusive, private moneylenders and microfinance
institutions reinforced each other as people often relied on both sources of bor-
rowing simultaneously to service debt.
Rather than contributing to the eradication of such moneylenders, microfinance
institutions were therefore the reason why some farmers borrowed from them
(see also Green et al. 2023; Ovesen and Trankell 2014). As a senior executive of a
major bank who wished to remain anonymous reported, “horror stories”,
whereby loan officers pressurised borrowers to repay by turning to moneylenders,
were common. “The minute a borrower goes to a money lender, that’s it, there’s
no hope”, the senior executive further remarked.
For many, the burden of managing these debts depleted their physical and
mental wellbeing, with many participants reporting high levels of stress and anxi-
ety as well as sleeping problems as a result. While the burden of juggling debts
took its toll on both men and women (see also Gu
erin et al. 2013), many women
reported taking on the extra burden and depleting effects of managing daily
finances. For example, the stress of managing multiple loans was having signifi-
cant effects on Kunthea’s health and wellbeing:
Every time when the loan fee date is coming, I am so worried. I cannot fall asleep; I
cannot eat anything ... When I am awake, I think too much about every other thing, I
don’t have money to pay the loan fee, and my daughter cannot earn money either. I
am afraid that my children will get sick. Look at me, I am also sick, and I have to be
responsible for the loan. (Kunthea, Village A, qualitative interview)
While farming has become more expensive and now necessitates significant
(micro)credit-taking, failed or bad harvests due to increasingly erratic weather pat-
terns often push farmers into even more debts. Further loans, both formal and
informal, are taken out to pay back already-existing loans. As we further underline
below, rather than contributing to building adaptive capacity among borrowers,
such loans deplete borrowers’already-limited resources and contribute to emo-
tional and physical depletion for many.
Sacrificing Food
For the past three years, Seda and her household have experienced bad harvests.
Floods during the first year, followed by an unusually-long dry period the year
after, and a rice-related disease during the third year, all had a very negative
impact on their yield and income. “This year, we received no profit. We barely
broke even because the yield was so bad. Our usual yield is 30 bags of rice but
this year, it was only 15 bags”, Seda said. While unable to produce their usual
harvest, Seda and her husband Pisey still had to repay the debt they acquired to
farm. This significantly affected the quality of food they were able to afford:
My food conditions were so poor. I needed to minimise my expenses as much as I
could to save money to pay the loan ... We ate crabs, snails, and other basic and
non-nutritional foods that we had. We were used to eating good and healthy foods.
Instead, we had to eat those tasteless and non-nutritional foods. (Seda, Village C,
qualitative interview)
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Our data suggest that the biggest threat to achieving food security among our
participants was reduced availability and access to grown, foraged, and bought
foods. The Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS)
8
—which is a measure
of the degree of food insecurity (access) in the household in the past four weeks
—indicates that among the 1,161 respondents of the household survey, the mean
HFIAS score was 4.6, indicating that households were suffering from mild food
insecurity. While only 30.6% of households could be considered food secure, the
rest were categorised as mildly (39.2%), moderately (26.9%), and severely food
insecure (3.2%). Importantly, and as Table 2shows, indebted households (<US
$4,200) experienced greater food insecurity than non-indebted households across
Table 2: Household Food Insecurity Access Scale, by debt level
Debt quintiles at HH level
No
debt
Debt
$1–
450
Debt
$451–
1,000
Debt
$1001–
2,250
Debt
$2251–
4,200
Debt
$4,201+All
Food insecurity items (%
yes) n =216 n =86 n =94 n =75 n =74 n =76 n =621
In the past four weeks, did
you worry that your
household would not
have enough food?
75.0 84.9 81.9 93.3 79.7 67.1 79.2
In the past four weeks, were
you or any household
member not able to eat
the kinds of foods you
preferred because of a
lack of resources?
60.2 77.9 77.7 82.7 71.6 44.7 67.5
Did you or any household
member have to eat a
limited variety of foods
due to a lack of
resources?
46.3 64.0 60.6 69.3 55.4 30.3 52.8
Did you or any household
member have to eat
some foods that you
really did not want to eat
because of a lack of
resources to obtain other
types of food?
37.5 55.8 52.1 52.0 48.7 21.1 43.3
Did you or any household
member have to eat a
smaller meal than you
felt you needed because
there was not enough
food?
24.1 41.9 35.1 33.3 31.1 18.4 29.5
Did you or any other
household member have
to eat fewer meals in a
day because there was
not enough food?
13.9 25.6 20.2 16.0 14.9 7.9 16.1
Depleted by Debt 13
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all the indicators. The situation was however reversed as far as the most indebted
households (>US$4,200) were concerned.
One reason for this is that these changes in agriculture and finance provision
depicted earlier have been beneficial to some farming households, largely deter-
mined by class relations (e.g. owners of machinery, big landholders). Credit—and
therefore debt—does not necessarily constitute a burden for all farming house-
holds but rather can facilitate the financing of production for some. In this paper,
the focus is mostly on those for whom debt reproduces and exacerbates socio-
economic and climate precarity, specifically households that rely on labour
incomes to reproduce themselves. Yet, it is crucial to note that (over-)
indebtedness, and the link between debt and food insecurity, should be under-
stood as shaped by class relations (see also Taylor 2015). In fact, our data shows
that the revenues of the most indebted households (>$4,200) are twice as much
as the revenues of non-indebted households. The most indebted households are
also more likely to own plots of land than any other debt groups.
For those for whom levels of debt directly impacted their capacity to achieve
food security, the necessity to pay back loans sometimes came at the expense of
food preferences, food diversity, nutritional quality, and more occasionally entire
meals. As Kunthea (Village A) articulated: “We have to pay the debt first”(see also
Res 2021). Importantly, our data suggests that women tend to be more food
insecure than men. While both spouses within the same household are usually
responsible for earning money and both contribute to paying back loans, we
found women to hold the primary responsibility for the daily management of
expenses and debt repayment. This usually entailed gathering money, counting,
prioritising which debts to repay and when, and, in some cases, “filling the gaps”
through adjusting their food consumption when the amount of money in hand is
not enough to repay the debt on a particular month.
In this context of constrained food security, participants increasingly rely on pro-
cessed and ultra-processed foods to augment their diets, with half our participants
classified as overweight and at risk of having other diet-related non-communicable
diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and hypercholesterolemia (Iskander
et al. 2022). Others reported how their inadequate diets were also leading to an
increase in illnesses such as dizziness, fatigue, weight loss, and insomnia. For
instance, Choum and Amara cultivate rice three times a year and sell part of the har-
vest to pay back their loan. After their field got flooded one year and their income
dropped as a result, they still had to prioritise the repayment of their debt:
I did not want them [Credit Officers] to come over to my house ... When I have less
money, I keep it for my debt ... I was tired because I did not have enough food.
When I have nice and enough food, I have energy and don’t feel tired at all. (Amara,
Village A)
Eroding/Selling Assets
In the event of a bad or failed harvest, many farming households resorted to sell-
ing assets to repay loans. Key among these were jewellery, livestock, and, more
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importantly, land. 15% of surveyed households reported selling at least one plot
of agricultural land over the past 10 years.
9
As Table 3shows, 31% reported one
of the reasons they did so was to repay loans. Our data also suggests that farming
households were the most susceptible to selling assets partly to service debt with
14% of farming-only households, 11% of mixed farming households, and 7% of
non-farming households resorting to this coping strategy. Overall, 5.2% (21 out
of 405) of all indebted households have had to sell their agricultural land partly
to repay a loan over the past 10 years. In a similar vein, a recent quantitative
study funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and
Development—a large industry investor—has detailed the extent of land sales in
Cambodia caused by microfinance institutions (Bliss 2022). The study estimates
6.3% of households sold land to repay loans (167,400 is extrapolated to all of
Cambodia) over the past five years (ibid.). Green and Bylander (2021:214), citing
previous socio-economic household surveys, state that in 2009, 6.93% of all
households sold land in the reference year, of which 18.58% sold it to repay a
loan. In 2016, it was 2.29% of all households, with 19.32% of these due to a loan
repayment (ibid.).
The issue of land sales linked to over-indebtedness was partially acknowledged
by some staff interviewed in microfinance institutions and ministries but was often
framed as an issue of personal (ir)responsibility. As one representative from the
Ministry of Rural Development stated, resorting to selling assets was usually done
because individuals borrowed “without a business plan”. However, participants
reported selling assets was often a “last resort”option when all other options had
been exhausted. Selling assets is well recognised as a highly harmful strategy in
the management of risk (ILO 2019) and one of the main reasons why the poor in
the global South fall into irretrievable poverty (Hulme et al. 2001). As a researcher
in a local NGO articulated:
What is the threshold? How many need to suffer human rights abuses before it
becomes a serious issue? ... I’ve had this actor say: “1% of borrowers suffering human
rights abuses would be catastrophic.”And I’m sure it’s above 1%, I’m absolutely sure.
Because I walk into the villages and I find them all over the place. (Qualitative
interview)
Table 3: Reasons why households have sold at least one plot of agricultural land in the
last 10 years
Reasons why households have sold at least
one plot of agricultural land in the last 10 years % (n =90)
Health expenses 34
To repay loans 31
Daily needs 15
Agricultural investment 12
Marriage/ceremony 7
Business investment 6
Funeral 3
Education 3
Depleted by Debt 15
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To be sure, the impacts of asset loss were unevenly felt among farmers across dif-
ferent socio-economic groups. For instance, while Kunthea felt “empty”after hav-
ing to sell her one and only cow to be able to partially repay her microfinance
loan, Amar said he did not regret selling some of his cows as he still had many
left. What this shows nonetheless is that microfinance loans in the context of
unpredictable weather patterns and climate shocks often lead to asset erosion for
many, directly contradicting claims of financial inclusion proponents that microfi-
nance facilitates the accumulation of assets and the spreading of (climate) risks.
Quitting Farming
I quit farming. I quit taking loans. I survive on my own [now]. My children work [in
another province], and I work here. I live based on what I can earn. I have taken risks
for two or three years already, but it did not turn out very well. We couldn’t develop.
(Rachana, Village C)
As a result of feeling trapped in debt, several participants like Rachana, who was
unable to make a profit from farming after three years of flooding and droughts,
took the decision to quit farming altogether. Rice farming was considered too risky
and no longer worth it. “When I took my loan of [of US$1,000], I expected that
there would be rain. But there was no rain. This was a failure”, Rachana lamented.
Thus, rather than facilitating livelihood diversification, as the argument goes among
proponents of microfinance as a tool of climate adaptation (e.g. Hammill
et al. 2008), microfinance loans can push borrowers away from agriculture and
reduce their income options.
10
Like Rachana, these participants often sold all or part
of their land and took other jobs or migrated to urban centres to work in the con-
struction and garment sectors. While Rachana remained in her home village, grow-
ing enough food for her and her husband’s consumption on their remaining two
hectares of land, her daughters took up work in garment factories in Phnom Penh,
sending remittances back to them. As she describes, the decision to quit farming in
favour of factory work came at both physical and mental costs to all of them:
Even though it was difficult, I still had to pay. I thought a lot. I was upset but some of
my children said: “Mother, you grow this and that so that there’s something to eat
and save money. We have to work to earn so that we could pay the bank back.”They
could earn a lot in the factories. However, a lot of people got poisoned because they
sprayed chemicals on the cloth ... I was so worried that my children could get poi-
soned with the chemical spray. As long as [the microfinance institutions] were able to
lend us, we were happy. If we struggled or delayed repayment, there wouldn’tbea
next time. Thus, we paid them back in full ... and I never failed to pay back.
(Rachana, Village C, qualitative interview)
While farmers often linked their physical and emotional stress to the next loan
instalment, they also emphasised that the shame and reputational damage of
having credit officers come to their homes to claim late payments was to be
avoided at all costs. In fact, repaying debt on time and in full was essential to
remain creditworthy—that is, to be able to continue taking out loans in the
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future. The necessity of creditworthiness, therefore, came at a high cost for many,
including ultimately quitting farming.
When Devi, another farmer in Village C, took out microfinance loans to help
him grow sweet potatoes, “it did not turn out as expected”. Following a drought
that destroyed their harvest, Devi and his wife decided to work in brick kilns
instead. When this strategy failed to earn them enough money to pay back their
loans, Devi took the risk of leaving Cambodia altogether despite not having the
right documents to work:
We didn’t have hope and were frustrated. We didn’t want to continue farming and
thought to rent our land to others. It was better to work for others. I did not have
money for the daily expenses. I had borrowed money from two microfinance institu-
tions at the time, so I had to go [to Thailand] ... My wife didn’t want me to work in
Thailand. She was worried I would be arrested by the police ... but I was committed
to leaving Cambodia. (Devi, Village C, qualitative interview)
While domestic and international migrations are often framed as climate adapta-
tion strategies, Devi’s case highlights how microfinance indebtedness exacerbates
not only the everyday financial challenges at home but also the fragility of coping
and adaptive strategies that migrant households employ across space (see also
Green and Estes 2022).
Conclusion
The operations of microfinance in rural Cambodia have become ubiquitous over
the past three decades. While its general positive impacts have now been seriously
called into question, policies and market initiatives that see microfinance as an
instrument of climate change adaptation have recently arisen in many countries
of the global South, including Cambodia.
In contrast to the much lauded adaptative potential of microfinance products
and services, in this paper we have delved into some of the depleting effects that
microfinance borrowing is having on the health and wellbeing of farmers trying
to sustain their agricultural livelihoods in a changing climate. Worsening climate
and environmental conditions, and the difficulties of overcoming them, means
that farmers are both struggling to repay existing loans and are becoming more
indebted as crops fail. Farming in a changing climate is expensive and unpredict-
able and adaptation-tailored microfinance products are not going to change this.
While microfinance for climate adaptation has significant kudos amongst main-
stream development actors and is increasingly a new turn in the broader “green
finance”agenda as a form of finance for adaptation, the data presented in this
paper has demonstrated the need for these promissory horizons to be re-
considered due to fundamental constraints revealed here.
Any new financial products are likely to remain a coping mechanism to sustain
the daily social reproduction of households rather than bring about a long-term
pathway out of climatic vulnerability and poverty. For several farmers that have
needed to quit farming, for example, their “diversification”as a result of over-
whelming microfinance debts has entailed turning to high-risk occupations such
Depleted by Debt 17
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as brickmaking where debt bondage and injury are rife in Cambodia (Brickell
et al. 2018; Natarajan et al. 2019; Parsons 2023). In this sense “ongoing climate
change amplifies, compounds, and creates new forms of injustices and stresses”
(Sultana 2021:447) in combination with financialised modes of adaptation which
can entrench rather than relieve harms being felt by farming communities in the
global South. The importance of tracing the intersections between depletion
through social reproduction and the impacts of climate and environmental
change (Rai and Goldblatt 2020) are thus affirmed. Facing not only increasingly
frequent failed harvests but also debt repayment problems, farming households
are pushed to take on depleting and sometimes dangerous strategies to manage
worsening conditions at home. Such a repertoire of strategic sacrifices—which
rely upon the physical and emotional depletion of so many borrowers—ranges
from cross-borrowing to the reduction of food consumption and diversity, to
unwanted migrations and asset loss, including land. Adaptation-oriented microfi-
nance products are most likely to offer only tweaks to a development agenda
that: individualises risk management and leads to harmful coping strategies;
leaves intact the root causes of poverty and inequalities at the local, national, and
global scales; and, perhaps most importantly, evades any questions of responsibil-
ity for the world’s ecological crises.
Acknowledgements
“Depleted by Debt? Focusing a Gendered Lens on Climate Resilience, Credit, and Nutrition
in Translocal Cambodia and South India”(2019–2022) was funded by the UK Research
and Innovation’s Global Challenges Research Fund (ES/T003191/1). We are sincerely thank-
ful to research participants for the sharing of their time, energy, and life experiences with
the research team. Thanks are also due to Mr Monin Nong from the Cambodia Develop-
ment Resource Institute (CDRI) for undertaking the village-level stakeholder research. We
would also like to thank Dr Sopheak Chann from the Royal University of Phnom Penh for
carrying out the environmental profiling of the three study villages.
Endnotes
1
Key promoters of climate-adapted microfinance include: international organisations like
the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), the World Bank, and the International
Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD); bilateral donors; and philanthropies (e.g. the
Gates Foundation).
2
First among those is the idea of “climate proofing”existing financial products. For loan
products, for instance, this entails modifying the terms and delivery methods of credit, or
loans that commit borrowers to make active steps towards some forms of climate change
adaptation (e.g. building a house that is less prone to floods or turning to crop varieties
that are more tolerant to droughts). Micro-insurance products, as well as weather warning
messages coupled with broader dissemination of climate-change knowledge, are also
deemed important to reduce the socio-economic impacts of adverse climate events (Helwig
et al. 2020). Second, and alongside the climate proofing of existing financial products,
new products, especially index-based agricultural insurance, have been developed and are
now sold by many microfinance institutions across the world. Index-based insurance is her-
alded as promising products for reducing agrarian vulnerability, improving climate risk
management and resilience, and boosting food security among smallholder farmers in
developing countries (M€
uller et al. 2017).
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3
While these studies have been largely ignored or disavowed by lenders and the Cambo-
dian government, there have been some recent efforts to address over-indebtedness. Most
immediately, the microfinance industry adopted a new self-regulatory code of conduct in
March 2022, which sought to integrate international client protection principles into insti-
tutions’lending practices. This new code of conduct has been pushed by so-called impact
investors, both public and private, who have grown increasingly concerned about abuses
within the sector following a three-year-long human rights campaign, led by LICADHO and
Equitable Cambodia, to hold investors accountable to their own investment principles.
However, despite these growing concerns, the self-regulatory measures taken by the indus-
try are largely insufficient to address the scale of the over-indebtedness problem in Cambo-
dia. First, the code of conduct is entirely voluntary, with no legal mechanism to enforce
compliance. Second, the client protection principles outlined in the code of conduct do
not address the underlying causes of debt stress, such as a warming climate, precarious
employment, fiscal austerity, or strong agricultural competition in domestic and regional
commodity markets.
4
With regard to new adapted products, Chamroeun and AMK are probably the most
active MFIs in Cambodia. For instance, Chamroeun works in partnership with UN-Habitat
on a programme which aims to make vulnerable housing more resilient to climate events.
5
Here, rice-farming households include both households for which rice agriculture is the
only livelihood strategy and households involved in agriculture alongside other income-
generating activities in various sectors including transport, construction, and manufacturing.
6
As Aiba et al. (2021) show, the average size of microfinance loans significantly increased
after the implementation of the interest rate cap policy in 2017. Smaller-sized loans, group
loans, and non-collateral loans were particularly affected as microfinance institutions sought
to maintain their profits per loan in response to a decrease in the interest rate.
7
To calculate households’annual income, we multiplied the income for each occupation
by the number of pay periods per year. For example, if an individual has worked as con-
struction worker for three months and earned $300 per worked month, the annual income
for this occupation would be $900. If individuals have several occupations, all incomes are
summed up in order to calculate individuals’total annual income. Note that households’
annual income refers only to income from permanent household members’occupations.
Thus, remittances, rent, and other financial resources are not included. As for the total
debt, it is calculated at the household level as the sum of outstanding loans from any
sources (including both interested-based and non-interested-based loans) for permanent
household members.
8
Developed by the USAID’s Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) Project,
HFIAS method is based on the notion that the experience of food insecurity (access) causes
predictable reactions and responses that can be captured and quantified through a survey
and summarized in a scale. For more information, see Coates et al. (2007).
9
As Green and Bylander (2021) clearly demonstrate, these land sales take place largely
through informal channels rather than the court system. Households tend to sell their land
to neighbours, kin, or other buyers they know.
10
See also Li (2009), who provides a scathing critique of World Bank’s 2008 “Agriculture for
Development”report, based on research on Asia’s rural poor. Li cogently examines how
farmers across Asia are exiting from agriculture as a result of neoliberal agricultural policies.
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