Market Failure and Primary Producers
There are two factors that affect the lives of farmers - Lack of financial planning and Information Asymmetry. Let us roughly cash flow of the marginal farmer (as owner or tenant or share cropper who cultivates agricultural land up to 2.5 acres) that will fall into low-income households. The cash out flow of the household is throughout the year and peak-out during festive season, marriage or birth) and bad patches (accident/death) in the family. The farmer gets cash inflow with sales of produce only. Hence, the borrowings of the farmer limits the growth option for the household. Let us take an excerpt from the paper - Why Don‘t We See Poverty Convergence? by Martin Ravallion - "Banerjee and Duflo (2003) provide a simple but insightful growth model with borrowing constraints. Someone who starts her productive life with sufficient wealth is able to invest her unconstrained optimal amount, equating the (declining) marginal product of her capital with the interest rate. But ...