Burmese Farmer's Debt Trap

“THE thought of crop failure worries me so much,” said Win Tun, an elderly farmer, squatting on a bank in his unplowed field under the scorching sun. “I’m afraid the next cyclone that hits us will be the spiral of debt.”

Win Tun is not alone. There are thousands of farmers in the Irrawaddy delta whose land has been inundated with seawater and who have lost their traditional “machinery”—cattle and buffaloes—in the cyclone that struck on May 2-3.

An estimated 780,000 hectares (almost 2 million acres) of agrarian land was ruined and more than 200,000 cattle and buffaloes died in the cyclone.

Normally, a farmer’s greatest fear is that a crop fails or yields a poor harvest. Missing a season is unthinkable. A farmer would have to work for nothing and buy everything on credit.

According to farmers, there should be an interval between plowing and planting. Traditionally they wait for several days after plowing so that the fields are in the best condition for seeds to grow. The last opportunity for planting this year was around the end of June. Farmers without seeds or the ability to plow their fields before the monsoon set in will miss out on a harvest in November—with dire financial consequences.

The next headache farmers face is employing workers to help in the fields. So many people were killed or have relocated since the cyclone that there is already a drastic shortage of labor. Others are too traumatized by the disaster and are afraid to return to farms and villages near the sea.

“Even if we offer higher wages for working on our farms, we will still not get enough laborers,” farmer Tint Lwin said.

Farmers often prefer to pay workers by giving them a certain number of baskets of rice. Without any rice in storage, this will be impossible this year.

Then there is the lack of fertilizer. Traditionally, many Burmese farmers spread the manure of cattle or buffalo on their fields. Without livestock or money, farmers have no natural fertilizer and are forced, yet again, to borrow.

If farmers have to buy rice seeds on credit, they encounter an additional dilemma. The seeds the authorities provide may be inferior or might not grow well in the delta conditions. Most farmers are not confident about working with different kinds of seeds.

To compound their misery, many farmers believe they will not be given loans if they have no equity. Normally they can guarantee a loan with their farm or equipment, but farmers who lost everything in the cyclone have nothing of value to use as collateral.