My wife's son works for a micro finance company in the Northeast. He sells loans and collects interest and repayments for a meagre 260$ salary a month. The first year's salary he has to spend on a Honda Dream to be able to visit customers. Staff can get a motorcycle loan at 'just' 8% per year. Private loans go for 1.2-1.4% per month.
Two days ago a customer nearly defaulted on his loan, he offered the kid a wooden chair worth a few hundred USD for 200$ to avoid an immediate default and losing his land. The kid now has a wooden chair on offer for 300$.
In Cambodia the whole covid thing is a major shift of wealth from the poor to the rich / middle class. This is just one example of a family losing money to be able to pay their massive amount of interest.

Covid-19 Aid Continues for Another Three Months
Ou Sokmean 07/02/2021 1:50 PM
Relief for poor families and hard-hit businesses
PHNOM PENH--The government has extended cash subsidies for poor and vulnerable families as well as workers in the garment and tourism sectors whose jobs have been lost or suspended due to Covid-19.

The assistance will continue for another three months until September. The program for the poor and vulnerable started in June last year, six months after Cambodia announced the first pandemic case.

This extension is the ninth round of government assistance and was decided after the eighth round ended in June.

Vongsey Visoth, Secretary of State of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, said on June 26 at a reception ceremony marking one million vaccine doses from China that the government had spent $350 million helping poor and vulnerable families during the crisis.

So far, 600,000 poor and vulnerable families have received government subsidies.

The government will continue assistance for garment and textile and tourism sectors to address the impact of the crisis and rehabilitate Cambodia’s economy.

Garment workers and tourism workers in hotels, guesthouses, restaurants and travel agencies will continue to receive $40 monthly subsidies from July to September.

During these months, the government will continue to exempt all taxes on hotels, guesthouses, restaurants and travel agencies registered with the General Department of Taxation.

These exemptions are for businesses in Phnom Penh and targeted locations such as Siem Reap, Sihanoukville, Kep, Kampot, Bavet (Svay Rieng) and Banteay Meanchey.
https://cambodianess.com/article/covid- ... ree-months

Revisiting the Pandemic: Rapid Survey on the Impact of Covid-19 on MSMEs in the Tourism Sector and Households in Cambodia
25 August 2021
DOWNLOAD [see link below]

The Covid-19 pandemic led to a dramatic roll-back of economic progress across Southeast Asia. While the region has managed to contain the spread of the virus better than most others, the economic impact on the region has been devastating. Southeast Asia is highly integrated into the global economy, both with regard to trade and international travel.

Since international travel stopped almost entirely in March, the tourism and business travel sectors have experienced unprecedented contraction. Many small businesses closed permanently as they cannot survive the economic losses brought on by Covid-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions. With each passing month, tens of millions more workers become at risk of sliding into poverty, including many in the middle class. As the pandemic drags on, temporary job losses have become permanent, and household incomes have plummeted.

To address the need for accurate data on how Covid-19 is disrupting micro and small enterprises, vulnerable workers, the informal economy, and heavily affected sectors, The Asia Foundation and partners conducted a series of national surveys and case studies in six Southeast Asian countries: Cambodia, the Lao Peoples’ Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Timor-Leste.

Revisiting the Pandemic: Rapid Survey on the Impact of Covid-19 on MSMEs in Tourism Sector and Households in Cambodia presents findings from two surveys in Cambodia. The first was the Survey of MSMEs in the Tourism Sector, co-developed by the Foundation in partnership with Centre for Policy Studies.
The second was the Survey on Households, developed and carried out by Angkor Research and Consulting, and Future Forum, with contributions and advice from the Foundation. The data present in this report consist of three-round of data collection that took place at two or three-month intervals between May 2020 and April 2021.
https://asiafoundation.org/publication/ ... -cambodia/

See also:
Report Reveals COVID-19’s Deep Impact on Cambodian Tourism Economy
First the industry was devastated by the collapse of international visitors. Then the virus began its rapid spread.
By Sebastian Strangio
August 31, 2021
https://thediplomat.com/2021/08/report- ... m-economy/

Another take on the microloan situation in Cambodia. I think here is the statement that summarizes the current situation exacerbated by COVID (link is provided if you have time to read):

"Cambodia has, by nearly any metric, the most overindebted microfinance sector in the world. By the end of 2020, the average microloan in Cambodia was nearly four times as large as the median annual income. There are more than 2.7 million microloans spread across Cambodia's 4 million households, and most of these loans are collateralized with borrowers' land titles, putting land ownership at risk.

While a legal mechanism for foreclosure exists here in Cambodia, numerous reports published by LICADHO have shown that it is rarely used. Instead, credit officers from microfinance institutions and banks prefer to pressure microloan borrowers who are late on repayments by threatening, browbeating and shaming them into selling their land to repay these debts, sometimes aided by intimidating and corrupt local authorities.

This means the inability to make microloan repayments can result in coerced land sales, robbing Cambodian families of their most precious asset. Even if a small percentage of loans result in such sales, it will irreparably harm hundreds of thousands of families."

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/The-mic ... g-Cambodia

cambo swa wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 11:47 pm This means the inability to make microloan repayments can result in coerced land sales, robbing Cambodian families of their most precious asset.

I believe that is the goal, not a collateral effect.
How such an amount of very convenient parameters wouldn't lead to a vicious strategy on a reasonable amount of time ?
Dirt-poor locals, foreign factories to fill, land to own, resources to pillage, it didn't change that much since foreign people stepped in. Less genocides nowadays, but still high mortality for many reasons...
It's a small country on all levels, the big shots know each others, and the world outside doesn't care too much.

Wouldn't be surprised that the big microloan lenders are of course tied with national big shots from the ruling class, it's just the second shortest way to grab land, after the physical eviction by force way of doing it.

A database of the evolution of land ownership parcel per parcel year after year would be more explicit, isn't there something similar existing already ? I have a feeling the total amount figure of land owners is shrinking little by little, sometimes even faster ^^...


Nice Kingdom of Wonder gif, this one

Woman Kills herself Over Debt Poverty

Cambodia News (Kompong Thom Province): On September 27, 2021, at 10:00 am at a cashew nut farm in Sambor village/commune, Brasat Sambor district, a 47-year-old woman whose name's Yong Roeun was found dead, hanging in a farm shack.

The woman reportedly committed suicide due to overwhelming loan debts.
RIP.

The Covid pandemic is now considered a thing of the past, but many Cambodians took on additional debt when they were forced to stop work due to the health restrictions in place at the time. Many of these people who were already struggling financially were women working in Cambodia's garment factories.
The workers say that they have problems to repay their debts because of the rise in the cost of living, the lack of a real living wage, and because there is less overtime work available since the pandemic. Because these families are living from paycheck to paycheck, the lack of extra money for overtime work is provoking major financial hardship.

Adidas, Nike Among Brands ‘Failing’ Cambodia’s Garment Workers
Jasmin Malik Chua
Fri, September 22, 2023 at 1:38 PM GMT+2·6 min read
Sportswear giants like Adidas, New Balance, Nike and Puma are leaving Cambodian garment workers to “languish” below the poverty line, a new report claimed Thursday.

Published by ActionAid, an international women’s rights organization, in partnership with the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, the Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions and the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union, “Stitched Under Strain” details what it describes as long-term wage loss, exacerbated by the pandemic, that has become the “daily reality” for workers in the Southeast Asian nation’s largest employment sector.

“What emerges is an alarming indictment of a global fashion industry that puts profit above the rights of garment workers in factories across Cambodia,” it said. “While most of the brands covered by this research have returned to profitability, workers’ financial precarity is worse than ever.”

Of the 300 workers researchers interviewed, one-quarter reported a decrease in monthly take-home pay, excluding overtime, since 2020, despite a legal minimum wage increase of $10 in the three years since.

When overtime was taken into account, the majority of those surveyed said they earned less than before Covid-19 hit, with the payments themselves plummeting by more than 60 percent from 2020 to 2023.

The global downturn hasn’t helped with creating enough orders, either. Cambodia earned $5.49 billion in apparel exports in the first eight months of the year, a nearly 19 percent year-over-year decline, according to trade data.

The post-pandemic reduction in overtime hours was one of the biggest concerns garment workers raised through the research the report noted.

The sector’s 800,000 mostly female workers, who are heavily reliant on this supplemental income to make ends meet, have gone from earning, on average, an additional $36 before the pandemic hit, to an average of $12 per month in 2023.

Only 4 percent of respondents said there was enough overtime for those who wanted it, while 67 percent said that overtime wasn’t an option for them at all. Of the 27 percent who cobbled together some extra hours, nearly all—85 percent—reported working less than 10 hours of overtime a week.

As the cost of living continues to spiral upward, workers across the industry are experiencing a rapid decline in their well-being. A 2021 study by ActionAid and the Cambodian Alliance of Trade Union found that 70 percent of surveyed workers experienced hunger in the immediate wake of brands’ slashing orders en masse in 2020. In 2023, the report said, the situation is “not much better,” with nearly half of surveyed workers (49 percent) saying that they often go to work without eating enough.

Researchers also found a “shocking intensification” in household debt stemming from workers’ financial insecurity. More than 90 percent of respondents reported being in debt, and only 8 percent said that they didn’t have any loans. Some 70 percent of workers reported that their debt has increased since the pandemic began.
Full article: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/adidas- ... nwBke9QQ5Y