Overcoming Obstacles to Agricultural Microfinance in Southeast Asia

This paper provides an overview of some of the main obstacles to agricultural microfinance and draws attention to certain issues to consider in crafting a strategy to overcome perceived obstacles. At the onset, it is good to delimit the discussion into the financing problem faced by smallholder agriculture, more particularly rural farming households. This is because there is very limited formal lending to smallholder agriculture while commercial agriculture is able to tap commercial loans from both private commercial banks and government banks.