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Abstract

There is a growing interest in exploring contemporary financialisation in terms of the geographies of debt. Many economic geographers have adopted a financial ecologies approach to explain these geographies. While this approach provides analytical benefits, it nonetheless analyses debt almost exclusively in terms of consumer finance, thereby overlooking the relations of production in which many indebted households engage. To address this issue, I develop the agrarian financial ecologies concept, which both directs analysis towards the diversity of credit–debt relations in rural economies, and highlights the relationship between land, labour and debt in the process of agricultural production. I apply this concept to study farm household debt in Cambodia, where indebtedness has become a widespread problem among farmers facing rapid economic transformation in the countryside. By focusing on land and labour, I demonstrate how diverse credit–debt relations within Cambodia's agrarian financial ecology have produced uneven socio-spatial outcomes, namely debt-driven land dispossession. This paper advances geographic theory about the dynamics of value production, circulation and appropriation within geographies of debt. It also extends the empirical remit of existing financial ecologies scholarship by attending to the credit–debt relations that characterise many agrarian livelihoods today.
Trans Inst Br Geogr. 2023;00:1–17.
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wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/tran
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INTRODUCTION
In recent years, economic activity has increasingly centred around the financialisation of everyday life. Consequently,
household debt now structures daily experience for many people, producing social, spatial and economic inequalities
(García- Lamarca,2022; Harker & Kirwan,2019; Langley etal., 2019; Rankin, 2013; Walks,2013). Within economic
geography, some scholars have adopted a financial ecologies approach to explain contemporary geographies of debt. In
this approach, the financial system is not structured solely by the logics of global capital. Rather, it is conceptualised as
a set of variegated ecologies, which are more- or- less spatially extensive and constituted by the interconnections between
diverse financial firms, institutions and economic actors. These financial ecologies are in turn characterised by unique
Received: 17 May 2023
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Revised: 25 October 2023
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Accepted: 23 November 2023
DOI: 10.1111/tran.12664
ARTICLE
Agrarian financial ecologies: Centring land and labour in
geographies of debt
W. NathanGreen
The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
© 2023 Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers).
Department of Geography, National
University of Singapore, Kent Ridge,
Singapore
Correspondence
W. Nathan Green, Department of
Geography, National University of
Singapore, Kent Ridge, Singapore.
Email: geowng@nus.edu.sg
Funding information
NASA Land- Cover and Land- Use
Change Program of the Earth Sciences
Division, Grant/Award Number:
80NSSC18K0287; National University
of Singapore, Grant/Award Number:
A- 0003620- 00- 00
Abstract
There is a growing interest in exploring contemporary financialisation in terms
of the geographies of debt. Many economic geographers have adopted a finan-
cial ecologies approach to explain these geographies. While this approach pro-
vides analytical benefits, it nonetheless analyses debt almost exclusively in terms
of consumer finance, thereby overlooking the relations of production in which
many indebted households engage. To address this issue, I develop the agrar-
ian financial ecologies concept, which both directs analysis towards the diver-
sity of credit–debt relations in rural economies, and highlights the relationship
between land, labour and debt in the process of agricultural production. I apply
this concept to study farm household debt in Cambodia, where indebtedness has
become a widespread problem among farmers facing rapid economic transfor-
mation in the countryside. By focusing on land and labour, I demonstrate how
diverse credit–debt relations within Cambodia's agrarian financial ecology have
produced uneven socio- spatial outcomes, namely debt- driven land dispossession.
This paper advances geographic theory about the dynamics of value production,
circulation and appropriation within geographies of debt. It also extends the em-
pirical remit of existing financial ecologies scholarship by attending to the credit–
debt relations that characterise many agrarian livelihoods today.
KEYWORDS
agrarian change, Cambodia, debt, financial ecology, labour, land
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financial knowledges, practices and subjectivities (Beaverstock etal.,2013; French etal.,2011; Lai,2016; Leyshon,2020;
Liu & Lai,2021). This conceptual approach is useful for studying household debt, because it highlights the complex, over-
lapping credit–debt relations in which households are embedded (Harker, 2020). In applying this approach, economic
geographers have explained the geographies of financial exclusion (French etal.,2011; Leyshon etal.,2004), the variable
production of debtor subjectivities (Carolan, 2019; Coppock,2013), and the inequitable outcomes of debt repayment
(DawnBurton,2020; Tan,2022).
Yet this existing financial ecologies scholarship has analysed the geography of debt almost exclusively in terms of
consumer finance. It has thus rarely attended to relations of production, even though production often structures house-
hold demand for, and repayment of, debt. This is a problem because capitalist production and finance are closely inter-
twined (Coe etal.,2014; Hall,2013). Debt can augment production by disciplining labour and by privatising household
social reproduction, thereby subsidising capital accumulation (Soederberg,2014). Moreover, by eschewing questions of
production, the explanatory remit of a financial ecologies approach is curtailed in geographic regions where households
who depend on resource- based livelihoods have become indebted in recent years (Fairbairn,2020; Green,2022a; Watts &
Scales,2020). Smallholder farmers in particular have long been targeted for inclusion into formal financial markets, both
in the Global North and South (Bernards,2022). The financial ecologies approach developed so far lacks the conceptual
and analytical tools required to explain how debt geographies in these regions intersect with agricultural production,
thereby overlooking significant consequences of debt- driven agrarian transformation (Gerber,2014; Green,2022a, 2022c;
Guermond etal.,2023; Li,2014; Ramprasad,2019; Taylor,2013).
To address this problem, I analyse farm household debt by focusing on the relation between financial ecologies
and agricultural production in Cambodia. My analysis is based on qualitative research carried out between 2019
and 2022. In rural Cambodia, where political economies and social life are now characterised by land privatisation,
commodification and out- migration, farm household debt is linked to the growth of a microfinance industry closely
integrated into regional and global circuits of capital. Yet I argue that this global microfinance industry also overlaps
with, and depends on, a diversity of other financial actors, including merchants and moneylenders, who provide
credit to fund farm households' production and social reproduction. Thus, while increasingly shaped by the accu-
mulation imperatives of finance capital, Cambodia's financial ecology is also shaped by multiple and intersecting
relations of credit and debt. While mapping out these relations is crucial, I further argue that changing relations
of agricultural production have structured this financial ecology in ways that have led to a rise in debt- driven land
dispossession.
In making my argument, I introduce the agrarian financial ecologies concept to advance scholarship on the geogra-
phy of debt. First, the agrarian financial ecologies concept directs analysis to the diverse and overlapping monetary and
financial forms, particularly credit–debt relations, which have long characterised financial markets in the countryside
(Green,2022a; Guérin etal.,2014; Taylor,2011). It explains the distribution of credit access and issues of debt repayment
in terms of differential connectivity between households and financial markets, particularly as these markets become
shaped by imperatives of capital accumulation. This focus is especially important as programmes of digital financial
inclusion target farmers around the world (Bernards,2022; Brooks,2021; Kong & Loubere,2021). Second, the agrarian
financial ecologies concept highlights how material production and financial ecologies are co- produced. By focusing on
land and labour specifically, it orients the study of financial ecologies towards questions regarding the production, circu-
lation and appropriation of value (Green,2022a, 2022c). Certainly, there is no singular circuit of capital that structures
credit–debt relations or their outcomes. Yet a focus on value bolsters the explanatory weight of the financial ecologies ap-
proach by interpreting debt in its relationship to class power and deepening social- spatial inequalities (Soederberg,2014).
In this sense, the agrarian financial ecologies concept heeds the broader call within geography to analyse the intersection
between finance and economic geographies of production (Hall,2013). By doing so, this paper extends financial ecolo-
gies scholarship to new geographic contexts, which is an essential task given that finance plays a major role in agrarian
economic and social life across a wide range of regions.
I begin by first explaining the concept of agrarian financial ecologies in greater detail. Following this, I outline my re-
search methodology. Next, I map out the diverse actors and their interconnections within Cambodia's agrarian financial
ecology. I then analyse how this financial ecology intersects with agricultural production, focusing on issues related to
land and labour. This analysis enables me to better explain the socio- spatial outcomes of indebtedness in the Cambodian
countryside, focusing specifically on the rise of debt- driven land dispossession. I conclude by recapping my argument
and outlining avenues of future research.
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AGRARIAN FINANCIAL ECOLOGIES
For more than a century, state and private actors around the world have promoted formal financial services, namely
credit, as a rural development strategy (Bernards,2022). In light of historical and ongoing efforts to incorporate farm-
ers into a global financial system, studying debt geographies within agrarian settings is of paramount importance. The
financial ecologies approach within economic geography provides useful tools to do so. Originally proposed by Leyshon
etal.(2004), the financial ecology concept borrows the ecology metaphor from science studies to explain the distinctive
interconnections and arrangements within the financial system. In this act of metaphorical redescription, ‘[financial]
firms, institutions, and other economic actors take the place of flora and fauna, while variations in culture, regulation,
and infrastructure form an “economic environment” within which such interconnections and interactions take place’
(Leyshon,2020, p. 124). The explicit reference to ecology builds upon network approaches by seeking to further empha-
sise the effects and consequences of distinctive financial arrangements (Leyshon etal.,2004, p. 626). However, unlike
Marxist geographic theories of financialisation, which accord theoretical weight to global logics of capital circulation,
proponents of a financial ecologies approach do not analyse the financial system in its totality (French etal.,2011, p. 812).
Rather, they study the financial system as composed of smaller, constitutive ecologies, each defined by distinctive, and
more- or- less durable, arrangements of institutions, economic actors and subjectivities (Lai,2016, p. 30).
The financial ecologies concept has been taken up in several ways by economic geographers to describe contemporary
geographies of money and finance, often with a focus on credit–debt relations. For example, they have developed more
nuanced typologies of financial markets that overcome simplistic binaries which have been used to describe peer- to- peer
lending and Islamic finance (Carolan,2019; Langley & Leyshon,2017; Liu & Lai,2021). The financial ecology approach
has also highlighted the socio- economic outcomes of credit–debt relations. Economic geographers have examined the
distinctive ecologies of prime and subprime retail financial markets in Euro- America, demonstrating how financial ex-
clusion from various consumer credit products, particularly home mortgages, has reproduced racial and other forms of
inequity (Leyshon etal.,2004; French etal.,2011, p. 813). More recently, the financial ecologies approach has been ap-
plied to explain how digital financial technologies contribute to consumer indebtedness by combining the affective lure
of credit together with coercive forms of repayment (DawnBurton,2020; Tan,2022).
This existing financial ecologies scholarship provides useful analytical tools to explain the geographies of debt in
agrarian settings. First, by mapping out the diverse intermediaries within financial ecologies, this approach seeks to
explain how these institutional actors shape the geographies of debt and why certain financial relations and processes
are more or less durable (Lai,2016, p. 30). In rural areas, despite state and private efforts to provision formal credit to
farm households, financial markets continue to be comprised of a variety of actors, such as private moneylenders, rural
supply merchants, state credit cooperatives, rotating savings and credit groups, and international banks, among others
(Green,2022c; Green etal.,2023; Guérin etal.,2014; Taylor,2011). In other words, informal lenders continue to persist
even alongside formal markets. To explain such ‘relic’ financial ecologies, Leyshon etal.(2004, p. 627) proposed focusing
on the spatial and social qualities of connections between creditors and debtors. They argued that credit–debt relations
have historically been based on co- presence; to assess credit risk and enforce loan contracts, creditors had to be socially
and spatially proximate to their debtors. Interdisciplinary research about rural financial markets has shown that even
with the rise of formal financial markets, informal lenders are often able to outcompete distant formal lenders because
they are capable of overcoming problems of information asymmetry and risky contract enforcement due to their em-
beddedness in local socio- economies (Ghate,1992; Steel etal.,1997). Moreover, in the case of agricultural settings, local
creditors frequently interlock credit with commodity markets for land, labour and inputs, which may lower transaction
costs, but can also be a form of additional exploitation (Harriss- White,1994; McMichael,2013). While formal and infor-
mal lenders often compete with one another, these diverse intermediaries also provide complementary services within
a financial ecology. For example, formal lenders such as banks may provide larger loans to fund long- term productive
investments in farming, whereas local informal lenders can help to finance smaller, short- term working capital costs
(Ghate,1992; Zeller,1994). Hence, mapping out the distinctive intermediaries within financial ecologies, as well as their
qualitative relationship with debtors, provides a more socially and spatially sensitive account of credit–debt relations in
which rural households are embedded (Coppock,2013).
Second, the financial ecologies approach explains the complex, overlapping connections between different actors
within an ecology. As Harker(2020, p. 47) has demonstrated, households are often embedded in a ‘cat's cradle’ of intercon-
nected debt relations. For example, as farm households become integrated into extended circulations of finance capital,
they are directly affected by the accumulation imperatives and decision- making of distant financial actors (Mader,2015).
Households may engage in complex borrowing practices to meet the strict time discipline of debt repayment imposed
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by such accumulation imperatives. They may seek to cross- borrow or loan- swap from informal lenders in order to repay
their formal loans (Green etal.,2023; Guérin etal.,2014; Taylor,2011). This is because, unlike banks, whose businesses
must respond to the demands of shareholder and investor returns, local creditors sometimes provide more flexibility of
repayment (Leyshon etal.,2004). A financial ecologies approach aims to highlight such dynamic, overlapping and co-
productive credit- debt connections within an ecology in order to explain theborrowing practices of households. Given
efforts to overcome spatial and informational barriers to expand financial services to farmers in geographically remote
areas, it is imperative to examine how farm households are connected to financial markets and how households service
their debts through strategic, yet also precarious, forms of multiple borrowing (Bernards,2022; Brooks,2021; Kong &
Loubere,2021).
While a financial ecologies approach is helpful in studying debt geographies in the countryside in terms of their diverse
actors, constitutive connections and uneven outcomes, this focus is not sufficient. Farm households often take on debt to
fund their agricultural production. Financial ecologies scholarship has largely ignored the relationship between produc-
tion and debt, focusing almost entirely on retail finance for household consumption. This focus on consumption stems in
part from a broader post- structural shift in theories of finance within geography, which emerged out of a critique of the
‘economic determinisms’ of Marxist geography's capital- centric modes of explanation (Leyshon & Thrift,1997, p. xii).
In contrast, post- structural theories of finance—in which the financial ecologies concept is grounded—tend to prioritise
the culturally embedded, discursive and affective dimensions of economic life (De Goede,2005; Langley,2008). Indeed,
these have been the primary dimensions explored by the financial ecologies scholarship about debt (Carolan,2019;
DawnBurton,2020; Harker,2020; Tan,2022). However, without considering production, a financial ecologies approach
lacks the ability to explain how geographies of debt are structured by the dynamics of value production, circulation and
appropriation. Such an analysis is crucial at a time when debt levels have skyrocketed as a result of deepening financial-
isation (Mader,2015; Rankin,2013; Soederberg,2014).
Therefore, I seek to advance the financial ecologies conceptual approach by explaining how debt intersects with land
and labour—two key aspects of agrarian economic and social life. I propose the term agrarian financial ecologies to
capture this relationship between debt, land and labour. Consider that, in recent years, there has been a global effort to
formalise property ownership to enable farmers to mortgage their land for agricultural investment. Following arguments
made popular by the economist Hernando de Soto, the World Bank has helped national governments around the world
title land in the name of rural development, arguing that land titles can secure tenure rights, promote property mar-
kets, and provide collateral for households to access credit (Deininger, 2003; De Soto,2000). Through this process, land
tends to be treated as a financial asset. In doing so, capital circulation through land can lead to new social and spatial
differentiation. Specifically, the tendency to treat private property as a financial asset opens land to speculative pressure
(Christophers,2010; Harvey,1982). Speculation on farmland often ends in periodic crashes, with farmers driven off
their land as they become over- leveraged, defaulting on their loans (Fairbairn,2020; Gerber,2014; Green,2019; Li,2014;
Natarajan & Brickell,2022). Exploring how capital circulation through land is either enabled, or impeded, by the specific
characteristics of credit–debt relations within agrarian financial ecologies is a crucial step towards explaining the uneven
outcomes of debt geographies.
Furthermore, as a factor of production, land plays a crucial role in shaping the structure of agrarian financial ecol-
ogies. During production, the time required for capital to circulate through land is determined not only by the labour
process, but also the time for crops to grow and the seasonality of the agricultural calendar. Given the accumulation
imperatives within capitalist agricultural production, there is a tendency to try and overcome such barriers of circulating
capital through land (Boyd & Prudham,2017; Henderson,1998; Prudham,2003). This can be achieved by altering the
biophysical processes of production or transforming the morphology of landscapes in order to speed up the circulation of
capital. For example, in agricultural settings, farmers may intensify production by borrowing to invest in new cultivars,
breeds, or cultivation methods that reduce production time. Moreover, rural development policymakers often promote
infrastructure like irrigation to expand the agricultural calendar so that debt- financed production occurs throughout
the year. Importantly, how capital circulates through land has a direct bearing on agrarian financial ecologies, because
financial actors may organise their institutional structure and lending activities to take advantage of different seasonal
calendars spread across agricultural regions (Henderson,1998).
The expansion of financial markets, particularly for credit, is also closely intertwined with changing labour rela-
tions of production. In the context of commodity production and integration into world markets, credit may function
as a mechanism for transitioning from labour- intensive to capital- intensive agriculture. Farmers borrow money to pur-
chase chemical inputs, irrigation water and labour- saving machinery, which often undermines local agro- ecologies
(Gerber, 2014; Gray & Dowd- Uribe, 2013; Taylor,2013). Moreover, debt can serve to discipline agrarian labour and
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deepen farm households' dependency on the market (Green,2022a, 2022c; Li,2014; McMichael, 2013; Taylor,2011).
For example, Watts(1983, p. 245) famously demonstrated that small- scale, family- owned farm households in colonial
Nigeria faced a ‘simple reproduction squeeze’ as they were caught between declining commodity prices and rising fixed
costs from payments for debt, taxes, rent and daily necessities. Farmers thus tended to degrade the land by intensifying
commodity production even as prices declined because they had no other way to pay for these fixed costs. Since this
study, political ecologists have demonstrated that debt- driven agricultural intensification has contributed to soil and
ecological degradation, making farm households more vulnerable to environmental hazards like drought and floods. In
many cases, farmers take on additional debt to recover from such events (Natarajan etal.,2019; Ramprasad,2019; Walsh-
Dilley,2020). Thus, explaining how farmers cope with hazards through their borrowing practices is a crucial task of an
agrarian financial ecologies approach.
The relationship between labour and debt in agrarian settings must be situated in relation to two additional fac-
tors. First, agrarian household debt is closely tied to how people borrow for their social reproduction (Bernards,2022;
Green,2019, 2022c; Natarajan & Brickell,2022). For instance, debts taken on to pay for the costs of healthcare and edu-
cation may be combined with, or affected by, debts used to pay for agricultural production. For this reason, an agrarian
financial ecologies approach has to consider the diverse, overlapping borrowing purposes of various members within
households. Second, and relatedly, agrarian households frequently depend on wage labour markets located in urban
areas or in different countries to pay for their production and social reproduction, including debt repayment (Green &
Estes,2019, 2022; Lawreniuk & Parsons,2020; Natarajan etal., 2022). In those households with access to remittance
income, debts can grow beyond the productive activity of farming alone. In this sense, the relations of credit and debt
within agrarian financial ecologies traverse multiple routes of human migration, enrolling diverse spaces into circuits of
finance capital. Focusing on labour mobility is thus significant for understanding the structure, and outcomes, of agrar-
ian financial ecologies (Green,2019; Green & Estes,2019, 2022; Guermond,2022; Harker,2020).
In the remainder of this paper, I deploy the agrarian financial ecologies concept to examine the geographies of debt
in rural Cambodia. To reiterate, this concept draws on existing financial ecologies scholarship by focusing analytical at-
tention on the diversity of actors and the complex, overlapping relations of connectivity within rural financial markets.
It builds on this work by attending to issues of land, labour and debt in processes of agricultural production and social
reproduction. In doing so, this conceptual approach can help geographers to better explain the socio- spatial outcomes of
debt in the countryside.
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METHODOLOGY
The research for this paper is based on quantitative and qualitative fieldwork carried out in Cambodia's northwestern
province of Battambang from 2019 to 2022. In June 2019, I led a team that surveyed 240 farm households in 12 rice-
growing villages across Battambang Province as part of a collaborative project comparing regional changes in rice farm-
ing. This survey collected data related to land ownership, labour relations, mechanisation, commodity markets and debt.
While not the primary analytical focus of this paper, I draw on data from this survey to provide contextual information
about the broader agrarian transformation in Battambang Province.
In May 2022, I collaborated with two staff members of a Cambodian research institute to conduct further research in
Battambang Province. We carried out 82 interviews with people involved in agricultural credit. The interviews were split
between two rice- growing villages in Battambang, Baku and Sala (see Figure1).1 Both of these villages were included in
the original 2019 study. I chose to revisit them to better understand credit–debt relations in the province, given that the
villages of Baku and Sala had a high proportion of indebted households, they had a diversity of financial actors, and they
had undergone significant agrarian change over the past 20 years.
To gain an overview of the agrarian financial ecologies within Baku and Sala, my collaborators and I first interviewed
local state authorities and bank staff. We then purposively selected from each village approximately 25 farming house-
holds who occupied different socio- economic levels to interview. We also interviewed local lenders, including money-
lenders and merchants. All interviews were semi- structured, with question guides focused on the diversity of credit–debt
relations in the villages, and how credit was used by farm households in their agricultural production and daily lives. We
conducted these interviews in Khmer, which I speak at an advanced level, and later transcribed them into English for
analytical coding using NVivo. While these interviews form the bulk of the data for this article, I supplement these data
with information from 58 interviews I conducted in 2021 and 2022 with actors at the national and international levels,
including the CEOs of bank and microfinance institutions, financial lobbyists, state regulators and foreign investors.
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These national- level interviews focused on financial regulation and investment, and were all carried out in English. I
have anonymised all interviewees to protect their identity unless they gave their explicit permission to be named.
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CAMBODIA'S AGRARIAN FINANCIAL ECOLOGY
Battambang Province is a major agricultural region in Cambodia, long connected to a wider market economy. In the
early- twentieth century, the French colonial government invested in the province to produce crops for export, due to its
good quality soils and strategic location next to the Tonle Sap Lake. To pay for commercial production, many farm house-
holds in those days borrowed from merchant- moneylenders. Commercial agriculture in Battambang then collapsed after
the country descended into civil war in 1970, followed by 4 years of genocidal rule by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979.
FIGURE  Map of study sites in Battambang Province, Cambodia (Source: Lee Li Kheng).
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In the 1980s, a new socialist government, backed by Vietnam and the Soviet Union, began to reconstruct the economy.
Early on, as part of larger collectivisation efforts, local state authorities distributed limited amounts of credit to farm
households, many of whom were unable to access it (Slocomb,2003).
The financial ecology situation in rural Cambodia began to change in the early 1990s. A United Nation's peacekeeping
mission oversaw a national election in 1993 while international development agencies sought to liberalise the economy
as part of aid conditionalities. At this time, foreign donors also helped to start up local non- governmental organisations
(NGOs) to provide microcredit services in the countryside. Several of these NGOs began their operations in Battambang
Province, where they distributed microcredit for small enterprises through group- lending methods. However, these mi-
crofinance NGOs quickly commercialised their operations to attract foreign investors and expand their loan portfolios.
Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund imposed monetary and fiscal reforms designed explicitly to promote a pri-
vate banking industry and hasten the commercialisation of the microfinance industry (Green,2023a). The mission drift
from donor- funded, non- profit NGOs to commercial microfinance institutions (MFIs) was part of a larger trend within
the industry, whose leaders argued that prioritising institutional management for financial sustainability rather social
impact would enable microfinance to reach a wider population of poor and low- income households across the Global
South (Mader & Sabrow,2019).
Today, MFIs and banks that provide micro and small loans are the most influential lenders in Cambodia's agrar-
ian financial ecology.2 The industry provides credit to more than three million borrowers—approximately 75% of all
households—in every province of the country.3 Consequently, on a per- capita basis, Cambodia is the most microfinance-
saturated country in the world (MIMOSA,2020). This growth has been propelled as the industry has deepened its con-
nections to regional and global financial markets. In the past several years, nearly all of the largest MFIs and banks have
been acquired by regional banks located in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. Despite this new ownership, these
MFIs and banks continue to supplement shareholder equity with debt financing from development finance institutions
and microfinance investment vehicles located primarily in Europe (Green,2023a).
In tandem with these changes in the institutional structure of the microfinance industry, MFIs and banks have
dramatically altered their lending practices. Unlike the original group- lending model adopted by Cambodia's micro-
finance NGOs in the 1990s, the past 20 years has seen the industry increasingly switch to providing individual loans
secured with land- based collateral. In addition to this switch, MFIs and banks also began to provide loans to people
for purposes other than small enterprise or agriculture. For example, throughout the 2010s, households increasingly
borrowed to pay for their social reproduction, including housing, consumption, healthcare and education (Green &
Bylander,2021). Indeed, due to inadequate state expenditure on social services and other welfare programmes, the
microfinance industry has facilitated the privatisation of social reproduction in the countryside (Green & Estes, 2019,
2022; Guermond etal., 2023).
Despite the growth of the microfinance industry, it has not displaced relic financial ecologies in Battambang Province.
Agricultural merchants and private moneylenders continue to persist in the countryside (see Table1). Merchants include
those who sell farm supplies on credit, primarily fertilisers and biocides, as well as small rice millers who provision
credit on the advanced sale of grain. Local moneylenders include large farmers, gold merchants and those with small
businesses, such as grocers and restaurant owners. The credit–debt relations of both merchants and moneylenders tend
to be characterised by social and spatial proximity: lenders reside near farmers, with loans based on familiarity and trust
rather than written loan contracts. However, in recent years, a set of non- local moneylenders have started up lending
businesses in Battambang Province due to growing debt stress among households, which was exacerbated during the
COVID- 19 pandemic (Res,2021). These lenders are comprised of pawnshops and rural credit operators located outside
of villages in nearby towns.
Today, farm households in the villages of Baku and Sala borrow from all of the lenders that comprise Cambodia's
agrarian financial ecology. As seen in Table2, 43% hold a loan with the microfinance industry while 35% of households
TABLE  Credit–debt relations of different financial actors in Cambodia's agrarian financial ecology.
Financial actor Collateral Interest rates Loan maturation length Scale of distribution
MFIs and banks Land titles and group loans 1%–1.5% per month 3–60 months National
Merchant Familiarity 2%–2.5% per month Seasonal Province and commune
Moneylender (local) Familiarity and land titles 3%–5% per month Weekly and monthly Village and commune
Moneylender (non- local) ID cards and land titles 20%–30% per month Daily, weekly, and monthly District and commune
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borrow from a moneylender, a merchant or both. Although prior scholarship on financial ecologies has argued that
people borrow from relic ecologies due to financial exclusion (cf. Leyshon etal.,2004), this is not the case in the
villages of Baku or Sala. Rather, each lender fulfils distinct credit needs of households, which are shaped by their
socio- economic situation. Banks and MFIs charge the lowest interest rates and are able to provide large loans if
households have the required land- based collateral. However, compared with moneylenders and merchants, bor-
rowing from MFIs and banks is time- consuming, involves extensive paperwork, and requires the signature of local
state authorities, which borrowers often prefer to avoid. Households thus borrow from moneylenders and merchants
when they need to access loans quickly to cover the costs of an emergency or to access a small amount to cover short-
term expenses.
While these lenders play distinctive roles within the agrarian financial ecology of Baku and Sala villages, they are also
interconnected in ways that reinforce uneven socio- economic outcomes. This is particularly apparent when we look at
the issue of over- indebtedness, which has become a serious concern in not only Baku and Sala villages, but across the
country. Over the past decade, between 22% and 50% of all microfinance borrowers nationwide have struggled to make
their monthly loan instalments, which are frequently greater than households' income (Bliss,2022, p. 46). The average
microfinance debt at the end of 2020 was US$4280, approximately three times larger than per- capita income (Equitable
Cambodia and LICADHO,2021, p. 2; Green & Bylander,2021). In Baku and Sala villages, the amount was even higher,
averaging US$8412 per household. As a result, households in these villages have experienced a growing array of hard-
ships associated with debt, ranging from forced migration to land dispossession. These hardships have also been docu-
mented throughout the country (see Bliss,2022).
Following existing financial ecologies scholarship (DawnBurton,2020; Harker,2020; Tan,2022), over- indebtedness
in Baku and Sala can be partially explained by examining the terms and conditions of household credit–debt relations.
In the past two decades, Cambodia has received a disproportionate amount of foreign equity and debt investment
into the global microfinance industry (Green,2023a). Owned by foreign shareholders and highly leveraged, MFIs and
banks have a strong imperative to turn a profit in a highly saturated industry. As such, stiff market competition has
reduced the quality of assessments of borrowers' repayment capacity, with aggressive loan sales to people who may not
be able to repay their debts. Moreover, the microfinance industry has extremely strict repayment policies, which are
shaped by demands for a steady rate of return from shareholders and investors (Green etal., 2023). As such, banks and
MFIs commonly use coercive practices, such as public shaming and threats of land seizure, to collect loan repayments
(Green, 2020).
However, over- indebtedness is not driven solely by the microfinance industry. The persistence of moneylenders has
also contributed to rising household debt. For example, both local and non- local moneylenders regularly borrow from
MFIs and banks to on- lend to people. For example, of the 17 moneylenders we interviewed in Baku and Sala villages,
the majority lent out money borrowed from a bank or an MFI, enabling these lenders to expand their client base. While
average household debt to the moneylenders and merchants was only US$674—significantly smaller than the US$8412
of microfinance debt—these lenders nonetheless play a crucial role in driving up overall household debt. Households
regularly cross- borrow from moneylenders in order to repay or refinance their microfinance debts. For example, non-
local moneylenders proliferated during the COVID- 19 pandemic because they provided short- term, high- interest loans
to people struggling with debt repayment to the microfinance industry. Such cross- borrowing has been a primary driver
of growing household debt across the country over the past decade (Liv,2013; MIMOSA,2020).
So far, I have examined the agrarian financial ecology within two villages of Battambang Province, focusing on the
diversity and interconnectivity of actors to explain the rise of indebtedness among households. Yet, this analysis does
not account for the full range of outcomes, or their causes, which characterise the geography of debt in Baku and Sala
villages. For example, is the rising demand for debt driven solely by an increasing supply of credit? And why do so many
TABLE  Summary of household borrowing practices in Sala and Baku villages in 2022 (based on author's interview data, n = 52).
Percent of households with debt to the microfinance industry 43%
Percent of households with debt to a moneylender or merchant 35%
Percent of indebted households that cross- borrow across lenders 32%
Average household loan size with the microfinance industry $8412
Average household loan size with moneylenders and/or merchants $674
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borrowers struggle to meet their repayments? These questions can be more clearly answered by centring land and labour
within Cambodia's geographies of debt. It is to this task that I now turn.
5
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LAND, LABOUR AND DEBT GEOGRAPHIES
Perhaps the most crucial story of Cambodia's agrarian financial ecology revolves around the mortgaging of farmland
to borrow money from MFIs and banks. Starting in the early 2000s, the Cambodian government and the World Bank
worked together to provide private land titles to the majority of households in Cambodia, most of whom were located
in rural areas. In 2012, the Cambodian government led another program, known as Order 01, to provide titles to many
households excluded in the earlier World Bank program. These titling programmes were part of a global effort to formal-
ise property rights in order to provide rural households with collateral for loans (Green,2019; Milne, 2013). MFIs and
banks now require land- based collateral for loans above US$1000. In 2022, more than 80% of the national microfinance
portfolio was secured by land titles, according to data shared by the Credit Bureau of Cambodia (Oeur Sothearoath, CEO
of Credit Bureau of Cambodia, 15 September 2022).
Widespread access to land title has been a boon for the microfinance industry, which has expanded its national loan
portfolio on top of a foundation of farmland mortgages. Securing loans with land titles has both expedited the loan assess-
ment process and minimised risks for shareholders and investors. For example, in an interview with a regional consultant
who has worked with the Cambodian microfinance industry for over a decade, we were told:
What we started doing when we first came to Cambodia was agri- finance … We would do research on rice or
cassava or whatever, and say ok, in this region, a hectare of X needs X amount of inputs, and that's what you
finance, no more than that. But that requires effort. You have to go and do your investigation and measure and
ask: is the client a good farmer? And all that other stuff. Whereas, if you just say, I'll lend against the value of your
land, that's a very easy thing to do … And if you're trying to do a mass production loan, lending process, that kind
of bespoke thing, where you know each client and their needs … That goes right out the window!
(Consultant, 16 November 2021)
In other words, land- based collateral has undermined detailed loan underwriting in the microfinance industry. By lending
against the value of the land, rather than the repayment capacity of the borrower, loans are at risk of exceeding household
incomes, which helps explain why the average microfinance loan today is larger than 95% of all incomes in the country
(Equitable Cambodia and LICADHO,2021, p. 2). Moreover, collateralised farm mortgages are a powerful risk management
technology: debtors discipline themselves to repay through any way possible out of fear and anxiety over losing their farmland
(Green,2020; Green & Bylander,2021; cf. Natarajan & Brickell,2022). Such a high rate of repayment, disciplined by collat-
eral, ensures a stable rate of return for shareholders and investors, who appropriate value from debtors on an expanded scale
(Green,2019; Green etal.,2023).
Land- based collateral has thus become a prominent feature of Cambodia's agrarian financial ecology, not only with
MFIs and banks but other lenders as well. For example, farmers in the villages of Baku and Sala increasingly deposit their
land titles with moneylenders to access credit. This practice was previously uncommon. A moneylender in Sala village
explained, ‘In the past, people were more honest, so it was easy to lend them money. Now, it is difficult as people are not
very honest like before. If you want borrowers to repay you, you need to keep their land titles when you lend. Otherwise,
it is just hard to get repayment’ (local moneylender, 11 May 2022). In a context of rising debt, where households are strug-
gling to repay their loans, the mortgage of land has replaced the trust that historically shaped the credit–debt relation
between local moneylenders and debtors.
As the use of land- based collateral becomes more common, land itself has become a financial asset, which is a key
characteristic of financialisation (Leyshon & Thrift,2007). On the one hand, the exchange value of land has come to take
on increasing importance in farmers' economic lives, as they are able to mortgage their land to raise money (Green,2019).
On the other hand, profits accumulated by foreign shareholders and investors are linked directly to the underlying value
of land. This transformation of land into a financial asset has been facilitated by new practices of land valuation intro-
duced by the microfinance industry. According to several bank and MFI branch managers in Battambang Province, as
part of a loan application, credit officers must assess the underlying value of the mortgaged land by gathering informa-
tion from neighbours, local state authorities, land brokers and others. The size of the loan is then limited to a proportion
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of the land's value—usually between 60% and 70%. Competition between lenders has introduced new speculative pres-
sures on the land market because credit officers regularly inflate the value of land to attract customers (credit officer, 11
May 2022).
However, valuation is not an entirely speculative process. Rather, in the villages of Sala and Baku where agriculture is
the primary land use, the value of land is tied to its productive potential. This is salient because the Cambodian state has
adopted rural development policies in the past decade to improve land productivity by constructing large- scale irrigation
works, which allow farmers to grow rice outside of the monsoonal rain cycle. In Battambang Province, irrigation access
has expanded rapidly, with 55% of households irrigating their rice in 2019 compared with just 11% in 2000 (see Table3).
Irrigation augments the amount a farm household can borrow from MFIs and banks because the value of land- based
collateral located nearby canals has gone up (Diepart & Thuon,2022, p. 5). For example, according to a district branch
manager of ACLEDA bank, ‘For land that can be farmed twice per year, it can get a high value estimate because it is com-
monly located near water sources, thus the borrower can earn income twice or thrice per year’. Moreover, as farmers have
begun to cultivate beyond seasonal rhythms, irrigation has sped up the circulation of capital through the land: farmers
who cultivate crops two or three times per year require additional credit, particularly during the dry season when chem-
ical and water inputs are crucial. In these two ways—through land valuation and intensified cultivation—the size of the
microfinance industry's loan portfolio is connected to growing access to irrigation water. This is a significant finding for
studies of agrarian financial ecologies because it shows that rising household debt, particularly to MFIs and banks, is
facilitated by water infrastructure projects designed to promote commodity production.
Yet, finance capital does not circulate through land on its own. It requires human labour working on the land to
produce value. The geographies of debt in the villages of Baku and Sala are thus also linked to relations of labour in
the production process. Indeed, unlike today, farmers in Battambang Province historically practiced labour- intensive,
wet- rice cultivation. In this method, cultivation was carried out by communal and kin- based work teams who engaged
in reciprocal labour exchange. These teams shared in the work of ploughing, transplanting and harvesting rice fields
following the weather patterns of the monsoonal climate (Green,2022b). Over the past two decades, this form of rice
cultivation has become less common. Its decline is attributable to a conjuncture of changes, including growing access
to irrigation and the commodification of production. Debt has also played an important role within this conjuncture, as
the proportion of households in Battambang Province who use loans for farming has increased from 17% to 51% over the
past 20 years. In the villages of Baku and Sala, farm households have taken on microfinance loans to purchase or rent
labour- saving machinery. In the 1990s, microloans in Battambang financed the purchase of two- wheel and four- wheel
tractors, which replaced oxen and buffalo. Since the 2010s, the country's largest banks and MFIs have aggressively sold
loans to wealthier farmers to purchase combine harvesters, which cost approximately $40,000—equivalent to more than
20 times GDP per capita. While credit has enabled wealthier farmers to purchase this machinery, most small farmers
utilise microcredit to rent it (Green,2023b). This means that on both sides of the class relation, credit has facilitated the
mechanisation of farm production, with the proportion of farmers using mechanical rice harvesters growing from 8% to
96% between 2000 and 2019.
As rice farmers have intensified their production by using machinery and cultivating crops more than once per year,
they have also become more dependent on merchants' credit to purchase necessary chemical inputs. In mechanised pro-
duction, farmers cannot manage weeds by hand or fertilise their fields using animal manure from cattle and oxen, unlike
prior forms of labour- intensive cultivation (Green,2022b, 2022c). Consequently, over the past 20 years, the proportion
TABLE  Changes in household rice agricultural practices in Battambang between 2000 and 2019 (based on author's socio- economic
survey, n = 240).
Rice agricultural practices 2000 2019
Households that borrow money for farming 17% 51%
Households that harvest rice with a machine 8% 96%
Households for whom rice is the main income source 73% 65%
Households that receive remittance income 5% 36%
Households that irrigate rice 11% 55%
Households that use chemical fertilisers 43% 94%
Households that use herbicides 35% 92%
Households that use high yield seeds 11% 71%
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of farmers applying fertilisers and herbicides has increased from 43% to 94% and 35% to 92%, respectively. While many
farmers borrow from the microfinance ecology to pay for these inputs, more than half of all farm households surveyed in
2019 purchased their fertiliser on credit from farm merchants. The demand has become so great, in fact, that merchants
have become less willing to sell large amounts of fertiliser on credit, pushing many to borrow from local moneylenders.
When asked why farmers would borrow from her, a moneylender in Sala village answered that, ‘Some farmers owe so
much money to input sellers that they could not go to get more, so they came to us. They need to look for different sources
for borrowing’ (local moneylender, 12 May 2022).
Finally, many families in Battambang Province have begun to migrate out of their home villages. This out- migration
is driven by a range of factors, including the mechanisation of production and rising debt levels. In the villages of
Baku and Sala, labour migrants move to either the capital city of Phnom Penh or across the border to Thailand, where
they send money home. Consequently, since 2000, the proportion of households receiving remittances has increased
from 5% to 36%. These labour remittances are now a crucial source of income for rural households to repay debts,
which they have accrued for farming and other costs of social reproduction, including housing, healthcare and cer-
emonies like weddings (Bylander,2014; Estes,2023; Green etal.,2023; Green & Estes,2022). Indeed, credit officers
and moneylenders now regularly lend money based on the amount of remittance income that rural households can
access (credit officer, 11 May 2022). In these ways, new translocal labour relations have restructured Cambodia's
agrarian financial ecologies, with remittances enabling farm households to borrow money beyond the productive
activity of the land alone.
By following an agrarian financial ecologies approach, we can note several key points about the relationship between
land, labour and debt. First, land as collateral has become a potent risk management technology, disciplining borrowers
to repay. Land- based collateral also underpins the growth of microfinance as loans are linked to the value of land, which
has increased in recent years as irrigation infrastructure has expanded. Second, the intensification of production en-
abled by irrigation, machinery and farm inputs has facilitated a faster turnover time of capital through the land, further
expanding the use of credit from different lenders. Third, debt- financed production has transformed labour relations,
contributing to mechanisation and rural out- migration. Household debts for farming and social reproduction are increas-
ingly repaid with remittances, tying the agrarian financial ecology to distant labour markets.
6
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UNEVEN OUTCOMES OF DEBT
Having explored the interconnections between land, labour and debt within the agrarian financial ecology in rural
Cambodia, I now explain how this ecology has contributed to uneven socio- spatial outcomes. While there are many
potential adverse outcomes of debt, here I focus on debt- driven land dispossession. This form of dispossession is of par-
ticular concern for understanding how debt both produces inequalities in rural areas and intensifies the appropriation of
value (Gerber,2014; Green,2022a; Li,2014; Taylor,2011).
Debt- driven dispossession is particularly significant in Cambodia, where a growing number of households have sold
land in distress in recent years to repay their debts. Although households reported selling their land to repay money-
lenders in the 1980s and 1990s, when the economy first became monetised following civil war and genocide, distress
land sales took off in the countryside following the commercialisation of microfinance and the parallel use of land as
collateral. For example, following the 2008 financial crisis, there was a sharp increase in recorded land sales, with 180,000
households selling their land to repay a debt in 2009 alone (Green & Bylander,2021, p. 214). This trend has continued. In
the past 5 years, some 167,400 people have sold land to repay a debt (Bliss,2022, p. 83). While these figures do not differ-
entiate between people who sold land to repay formal or informal debt, the proportion of households with loans sourced
from an MFI or bank grew from 46.2% to 84.7% between 2009 and 2016, suggesting that distress land sales are closely
linked to rising microfinance debt (Green & Bylander,2021, p. 209).
Debt- driven land dispossession has also been a trend in the villages of Baku and Sala. Like elsewhere in Cambodia,
households in these villages received agricultural land in the 1980s as part of the socialist government's land redistribu-
tion programme. However, both villages now have households with no land at all. In Sala, according to the village chief,
more than half of households are landless. In contrast, there are a handful of absentee landlords who own between 50
and 100 hectares of farmland (the average landholding in our 2019 survey was 3.31 hectares). While some of this land was
appropriated through extra- legal channels in the 1990s—these landlords were powerful military officials at the time—
much of the village's agricultural land was sold by households struggling with debt. The village chief explained:
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He [an absentee landlord] did not come and grab our land. He bought from us when we wanted to sell, so
over the years he could accumulate a lot of land. I think this explains it better: we lost our land because of
the MFIs. We did not have money to spend, so we borrowed from MFIs and kept our land titles with them.
When we could not repay, MFIs would pressure us to sell land, so we sold land to repay the loans to them.
(Village chief, 10 May 2022)
In Baku village, farmers have similarly sold their land in distress over the past several decades, with 20% of households now
landless. They have sold land for various reasons, such as to pay for education, but also to repay their debts. When asked what
changes there had been in the village since microfinance became widespread, the village chief of Baku told us that there has
been more out- migration and a greater loss of assets. While few people have had their land confiscated directly, households
struggling with debt have sold their land on their own because they felt they had no other option given that their land title
was held by a bank or MFI (village chief, 13 May 2022).
How might we explain this debt- driven dispossession using an agrarian financial ecologies approach? According to
existing financial ecologies scholarship, the way that households are connected (or not) to financial markets is a crucial
dimension of socio- spatial inequalities produced by debt (DawnBurton,2020; Harker,2020; Langley & Leyshon, 2017;
Leyshon etal.,2004; Tan,2022). In the case of rural Cambodia, microfinance has connected households to the capital
accumulation imperatives of distant shareholders and investors. Not only has foreign investment supplied this industry
with the necessary capital to expand and deepen access to credit, but MFIs and banks have also become reliant on the
mortgage of land, which has undermined detailed loan underwriting. In both cases, these practices push debt levels
beyond households' income. While these are important factors, an agrarian financial ecologies approach goes further by
rooting the explanation within the relations of production. Consider this exchange with a farmer in Sala village:
Interviewer: How about the lands owned by your children working in Thailand? Who are working those lands?
Respondent: Their siblings in Cambodia. Some of my children already sold their lands before going to Thailand. They
were in debt so they had to sell their land to repay the loans.
Interviewer: Why did they get into debt?
Respondent: They lost money from doing rice farming. The rice stalks were empty because of the prolonged drought.
For rice farmers, we borrow to get capital to do farming so that when we can sell our harvest, then we can repay. But
when our production is affected, we cannot gain enough to repay the loans we take. For traders or MFIs, they will ask
us to repay at the end of the farming cycle. (Farmer, 12 May 2022)
Here, the farmer was articulating the basic logic of a simple reproduction squeeze: her children had been caught between
rising fixed costs of production and declining returns. By taking on debt to intensify agricultural production, many farmers in
Battambang Province have acquired costs beyond their capacity to repay.
Exacerbating this problem, downward pressures on farm income have limited households' capacity to pay their fixed
costs. For instance, the price of rice is dictated by an oligopoly of large millers who have the export contracts and li-
cences to sell on international markets (Green,2022b). In an interview with the manager of one of the largest mills in
the country, located near Sala village, we were told that millers help drive farmers into over- indebtedness because they
artificially push prices down (rice miller, 14 May 2022). Alongside this market squeeze, a changing climate has exposed
farm households to greater environmental hazards. Regional temperatures are on average 0.8°C higher than in 1960,
subjecting households to more extreme heat throughout the year. Furthermore, a changing monsoonal weather pattern
has increased the frequency of droughts and floods (Guermond etal.,2023). One farmer in Sala village told us,
Our area has been flooded for three years in a row already, so our wet rice farming has been badly affected.
From the five hectares of paddies behind our house here, we could barely get 500 kg from one hectare last
year because they were too flooded. We spent a lot on inputs and barely got any return.
(Farmer, 11 May 2022)
As the climate changes, new relations of intensified production have made households more vulnerable to environmental
shocks.
That being said, as mentioned previously, farm households in Battambang Province no longer reproduce themselves
solely through farming. They engage in translocal householding, diversifying their incomes through migration (Green &
Estes,2022). When faced with a failed harvest following extreme droughts or floods, household members often migrate to
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Thailand to repay their loans (credit officer, 11 May 2022). Such debt- driven migration has become common throughout
Cambodia, particularly in the northwestern region of the country (Bylander,2014). Migration has a direct bearing on
households' ability to avoid selling their land in distress: households that have gained greater access to remittances are
often better able to cope with hazards in lieu of selling their land, which may reinforce local socio- economic inequalities
(Lawreniuk & Parsons,2020).
Alongside migration, households often cross- borrow from lenders within Battambang's agrarian financial ecology
to avoid selling their land in distress. In Baku and Sala villages, one- in- three households who held a micofinance loan
have turned to a moneylender to either repay or refinance it. These lenders are more willing to negotiate with debtors
than MFIs or banks, largely because of their physical proximity and social connections. For example, one farmer in Baku
village, who refused to borrow from an MFI or bank, told us that,
MFIs always strangle our neck. We cannot be late to repay even for one minute. If we borrow from local
lenders, sometimes if we don't have money, we can be late for one or two months. With MFIs, we cannot do
that. So even with a higher interest rate, we prefer to borrow from the moneylender. Many people had to run
away from the village because of MFI loans.
(Farmer, 14 May 2022)
This flexibility of repayment is one of the primary reasons that lenders from Cambodia's relic financial ecologies persist,
but also why some households have been able to avoid selling their land in distress. That said, as credit–debt relations in
Battambang's agrarian financial ecology become more entangled, the disciplinary pressures of repayment in the microfinance
industry have begun to cascade down to moneylenders as well. For example, one moneylender in Baku village had lent out
US$50,000 to fellow villagers, using a loan from a commercial bank. She faced daily threats of property seizure from the bank
during the height of the COVID- 19 pandemic, when her debtors could not afford to repay her. As such, she had become
more strict, with several people selling land to repay her in the past several years (moneylender, 25 May 2022). This trend was
evident in the village of Sala as well, where multiple moneylenders told us that they had acquired land from their debtors in
recent years. In this way, the patterns of debt- driven land dispossession are shaped by the overlapping credit–debt relations
that constitute Cambodia's agrarian financial ecology.
7
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CONCLUSION
In this paper, I have introduced and applied an agrarian financial ecologies approach to explain the geographies
of debt in the Cambodian countryside. Building on scholarship about financial ecologies within economic geogra-
phy, this concept draws attention to the diversity and proliferation of actors within financial markets, and how these
markets are constituted through relational connections between these actors, which produce unequal socio- spatial
outcomes. The microfinance industry is now the dominant lender in rural Cambodia due to its connectivity to interna-
tional shareholders and investors, who lend capital secured by farmland mortgages. Despite this industry's connection
to global circuits of capital and its extensive spatial reach, other types of creditors have nevertheless endured and even
expanded in recent years, largely as households cross- borrow from moneylenders to repay their microfinance debts.
However, I have also argued that focusing solely on consumer finance is insufficient for explaining the geogra-
phies of debt and their outcomes in rural regions. By developing an agrarian financial ecologies approach, I have cen-
tred issues of land and labour in my analysis of household debt. In doing so, I have demonstrated that the financial
ecology in Cambodia is shaped by how capital circulates through land as well as the labour relations of agricultural
production and social reproduction in the countryside. Many farmers have sold their land in distress as they are
squeezed between rising fixed costs of production and declining returns. By analysing the spatially stretched and
entangled relations of debt repayment, I have also shown that some households are able to avoid selling their land,
at least temporarily.
The approach I have developed here offers several broad contributions to geographic scholarship about debt. First,
it highlights the relationship between land and financial markets, demonstrating that they are tightly linked through
processes of production. Specifically, it helps to explain how the mortgage of land influences the geographic patterns of
capital investment in the countryside (Fairbairn,2020; Ouma,2020). Second, an agrarian financial ecologies approach
focuses attention on questions related to value within financial markets. It demonstrates that land and labour remain
crucial to the production of value underpinning circuits of finance capital (Hall, 2013; Soederberg, 2014). Third, this
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14
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GREEN
approach extends the study of financial ecologies to more geographic regions by adapting the financial ecologies concept
for resource- based livelihoods, particularly those of farm households. This is a crucial task as farmers around the world
are adversely incorporated into global agricultural production networks, increasingly through new financial technologies
(Brooks,2021; Kong & Loubere,2021). In these ways, an agrarian financial ecologies approach advances research on the
uneven geographies of debt during a critical time of ongoing financialisation.
ACKNO WLE DGE MENTS
This research was funded by two grants: a faculty start- up grant at the National University of Singapore (A- 0003620-
00- 00), and a grant with the NASA Land- Cover and Land- Use Change Program led by Jefferson Fox from the East–
West Center (80NSSC18K0287). Many thanks to my research partners at the Cambodia Development Resource Institute,
Theavy Chhom and Mony Reach, as well as research assistants Rosa Yi and Tan Jia Yee for their help in collecting pri-
mary and secondary source material, respectively. I also appreciate the help of Jennifer Estes and members of the Politics,
Economies, and Space research group in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore, who all
provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Finally, I greatly appreciate the valuable feedback from the
editor, Matt Sparke, and three anonymous reviewers.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Research data are not shared.
ORCID
W. Nathan Green https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0498-5623
ENDNOTES
1 These village names are pseudonyms and their locations on the map are not precise.
2 I use the term microfinance industry to refer to those institutions registered with the Cambodia Microfinance Association, as well as
seven commercial banks that began as MFIs and for whom borrowers accessing microcredit continue to make up a large portion of their
clientele.
3 Unpublished industry data from Cambodia Microfinance Association's Information Exchange in second quarter of 2022.
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Since the global financial crisis, the world has seen a stark rise in financial investment in farming and agricultural production. Indeed, finance has been identified as one of the main causes of the so-called 'global land rush'. In a world with a growing population that needs to be fed, the financial returns from agriculture are sold as safe bets. The debate that this has prompted has been frequently alarmist, with financiers blamed for rising land prices, corporate enclosures, the dispossession of smallholder farmers and the expansion of large-scale industrial agriculture. Stefan Ouma speaks to these concerns via an ethnographic journey through the agrifocused asset management industry. His penetrating analysis of case studies taken from New Zealand and Tanzania allows him to put global finance 'in place', bringing into view the flesh-and-blood institutions, globe spanning social relations, everyday practices and place-based value struggles that are often absent in broad-brushed narratives on the 'financialization of agriculture'. The book closes with a key question for the Anthropocene: which form of finance forwhich kind of food future?
Book
Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People tells the previously untold stories of those living with mortgage debt in times of precarity and explores how individualized indebtedness can unite resistance in the struggle toward housing justice. The book builds on years of activist-research engagement in Barcelona’s housing movement, in particular with its most prominent collective, the Platform for Mortgage-Affected People (PAH), and rethinks how lived experiences of indebtedness connect to larger political- economic processes related to housing and debt. The book is inspired by feminist scholars who integrate the lens of everyday life into explorations of contemporary political economy and by anthropologists who connect macroprocesses to lived experience. Distinctive in how it integrates a racialized, gendered, and decolonial perspective, García-Lamarca’s research of mortgaged lives in precarious times explores two principal phenomena: first, how financial speculation is experienced in the day-to-day and differentially embedded in the dynamics of (urban) capital accumulation, and second, how collective action can unleash the liberating possibility of indebtedness.