Hime from Cambodia usually worked as a hired hand for other farmers, but in 2023, she decided to rent land and try to earn more by planting cassava and managing the fields herself. She didn’t have enough cash on hand to buy pesticides and fertilizers, so she bought them on credit.
She harvested the cassava in early 2024. It didn’t seem like an exceptional yield, and by the time she dried and sold the cassava, the price had dropped. Would she really make a profit? She sold the last of the cassava and paid the harvesters, but she still owed more than $1,000 to her pesticide creditors.
Hime had suffered a significant loss on her cassava crop. She didn’t know what to do except take out a loan from the bank. Hime borrowed $1000, which…