The weakness of agricultural credit in Myanmar (1)

This post contains the first and second columns of an article on the challenges of weak credit for farmers in Myanmar. It comes from page 29 of 7 Day News, April 28, 2011. The rest of the article will be translated in a subsequent post.

Vocabulary:

ချေးငွေ ။ financial loan
အားနည်း ။ weak
လှေ ။ boat
ကဏ္ဍ ။ section
ငွေရှင်ကြေးရှင် ။ wealthy or rich person, creditor
ဆုတ် ။ to recede, ebb, wane
အရင်းအနှီး ။ investment, capital
အား ။ resources
အစား ။ substitute
ဟင်းကျွေး ။ curry
နှုန်း ။ rate
မြင့်မား ။ lofty, tall

Translation:

Due to the weakness of loans farm owners are becoming landless

In a small room the old farmer U Htun Htun looked at the many people and exhaled deeply. U Htun Htun who was about 50 years old while entering the room and sitting down on a bench wiped the sweat from his forehead with a towel.

Because [people] had requested assistance from the Aung Yadana Social Association which gives money and technical support for the agricultural occupations of some of the villages in Phyabon Township, [U Htun Htun] had come by boat to Kyon Min village which was about 5 miles away. [He] had left his work which he was doing and came with the hope that in the future he could get the support of a financial loan.

That current meeting was not a meeting that would give a financial load as U Htun Htun had thought. It was a meeting of media organisations and farmers as part of a program of the Phyo Bin organisation which was an NGO for the development of the Myanmar agricultural sector.

U Htun Htun explained that the difficulty currently being experienced was that "Some paddy fields from the present village have fallen into the hands of creditors."

In the years after Cyclone Nargis struck, farmers from the delta have been facing one difficult after another. Due to climate change, and because there has been a waning of agricultural crops, and there have not been sufficient draft buffaloes and cattle, and there have been insufficient financial loans for investment,
[farmers] have not being able to sufficiently purchase input resources and have been experiencing such problems up to the present day.

Although social organisations, INGOs and governmental organisations provide support there is still a need to work very hard to get back to the original situation.

U Min Soe from Myin Ka Gon village who was an owner of 6 acres of paddy land said "Presently instead of buffaloes and cattle we have to use machines. However, after buying petrol [we] can't even eat good curry."

The high cost of petrol for machines and the difficulty of purchasing [petrol] is a suffocating thing for farmers.

Other than that, farmers have experienced difficulties because this year the weather during the rainy season paddy crop has been bad.