Ing-Britt Trankell

Symbiosis of Microcredit and Private Moneylending in Cambodia

Microcredits potential for poverty reduction is a highly contested issue. In Cambodia, the dramatically increasing commercial microcredit coexists with widespread private moneylending. These two practices are rooted in different economic world views: neoliberalism on the one hand, and the traditional Khmer economic sociality permeated by patronage on the other. The ethnography shows that far from competing with each other, microcredit and private lending have adapted to form a symbiotic relationship, and much private lending is financed through microcredit. While microcredit is often beneficial to people living well above the poverty line, the widespread access to credit, through microloans as well as private lending, is threatening the livelihoods of the economically most vulnerable and precipitating their social, economic and spatial exclusion from their local communities. In contrast to the social and economic exclusion caused by land grabbing and forced evictions, which has received a fair amount of public attention, exclusion as a consequence of indebtedness has, for sociocultural reasons, remained much less visible.