Cambodia Exported $5.3 Billion in Agricultural Products Last Year. Two Million Farming Households Still Can't Prove They're Creditworthy

AGXL | April 2026

In 2025, Cambodia's agriculture sector had its best year on record. The Kingdom exported 12 million tonnes of agricultural products to 95 countries, worth $5.3 billion. Nearly 600,000 tonnes of milled rice reached global markets. Cashew exports surged — Cambodia is now the world's second-largest cashew producer, with the sector alone generating over $1.5 billion, equivalent to 3% of GDP. Rubber, pepper, cassava, mango, and vegetables added billions more.

The government launched its first comprehensive agricultural census in over a decade, covering all 25 provinces and documenting nearly two million agricultural holdings. The inaugural Cambodia Agriculture Exhibition and Forum showcased nine strategic commodities to international investors. Development partners including the EU, IFAD, and ADB committed nearly €80 million to modernise the sector through the ASPIRE-AT programme, targeting 100,000 smallholder farmers and 25,000 land-poor households.

Cambodia's agriculture is no longer a subsistence story. It is a commercial export engine — growing, diversifying, and attracting serious international capital.

And yet, the fundamental problem remains: the farmers who make this engine run cannot prove to a bank that they are creditworthy.

Two Million Holdings, One Missing Layer

Cambodia's 2023 agricultural census documented nearly two million farming households — the most comprehensive dataset the country has ever produced on who farms what, where, and how. Government officials rightly called it a milestone. The Food and Agriculture Organisation described it as a foundation for managing future risks and opportunities.

The census tells the country how much land is under cultivation, what crops are planted, what livestock is raised, and what irrigation exists. What it does not tell anyone is which farmers are reliable borrowers. Census data is demographic and agronomic. It is not financial. It maps the sector. It does not score it.

Agriculture still employs roughly a third of Cambodia's workforce — 3.1 million people as of 2023. The sector contributed 16.7% of GDP in 2024. Most Cambodian farmers are smallholders managing plots averaging just 1.3 hectares. Rice dominates, accounting for over half of cultivated land, concentrated around the Tonle Sap basin and the Mekong river plains. But diversification is accelerating — cashew, cassava, rubber, pepper, vegetables, mango, and aquaculture are all expanding.

The Agricultural and Rural Development Bank has extended approximately $440 million in loans to the sector, offering products ranging from green loans to wholesale financing for financial institutions. The government actively encourages agricultural investment through its National Agricultural Development Policy. The policy infrastructure for agricultural lending exists.

What does not exist is the borrower-level credit intelligence that would allow these policies and programmes to work at the scale Cambodia needs.

Poultry: 1.2 Million Households and a Transformation Underway

One of Cambodia's most significant agricultural stories is the transformation of its poultry sector. An estimated 1.2 million households raise poultry — making it one of the most widespread agricultural activities in the country. Most production remains smallholder and backyard-scale, but commercial operations are growing rapidly as regional integrators expand and government programmes invest in modern value chains.

International development programmes are accelerating this transition. One major initiative is targeting 88,300 poultry households by 2026, working across the entire value chain — from hatcheries and breeding to processing and market access. The government's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has partnered with development organisations to form cooperative unions across multiple provinces, building the institutional infrastructure for a more organised poultry sector.

This is a sector in transition — moving from subsistence-level backyard production toward structured, commercially viable operations. That transition requires capital. Farmers upgrading from backyard flocks to small commercial operations need investment in housing, feed systems, and biosecurity. Cooperatives seeking to aggregate production and access larger markets need working capital and infrastructure financing.

The demand for credit is clear. The supply is constrained by the same problem that affects agricultural lending everywhere in the developing world: the inability to assess whether a farmer who wants to borrow is likely to repay.

The Cashew Paradox

Cambodia's cashew story illustrates the credit gap in sharp relief. The sector generated over $1.5 billion in 2025 — a remarkable achievement for a crop that barely registered in exports a decade ago. Cambodia is now the world's second-largest cashew producer, behind only Côte d'Ivoire.

But here is the paradox: only 10% of Cambodian cashews are processed domestically. The remaining 90% are exported raw, primarily to Vietnam, where the value-added processing occurs. The Asian Development Bank has identified this as one of Cambodia's most significant economic leakages — hundreds of millions of dollars in processing revenue flowing to neighbouring countries because Cambodian producers and enterprises lack the capital to invest in processing infrastructure.

The credit constraint is not abstract. It is measurable. A cashew farmer who could access financing to invest in drying, grading, and packaging equipment would capture significantly more value per kilogram. A cooperative that could finance a processing facility would transform the economics of an entire supply chain. The demand exists. The market exists. The capital does not flow because the credit assessment infrastructure does not exist.

Rice: The Staple Gap

Rice tells a similar story at an even larger scale. Cambodia grows far more rice than it consumes, yet mills only about a third of what it produces. The rest is exported as paddy — the least valuable form of the commodity — because smallholder farmers and local processors cannot access the working capital and equipment financing needed to move up the value chain.

The government's Cambodian Rice Federation has set ambitious export targets for milled rice. In 2024, the country exported 651,522 tonnes — progress, but still short of the one-million-tonne target. Closing that gap requires investment at the farm and cooperative level — investment that remains constrained by the absence of systematic credit assessment for the smallholder farmers who produce the paddy.

Climate Resilience Requires Credit Resilience

Cambodia's climate-smart agriculture plan moved into its implementation phase in 2026, with priorities including low-emission rice cultivation, drought-resistant and flood-tolerant crop varieties, enhanced water management, and sustainable aquaculture and livestock practices.

Every one of these priorities requires farmer investment. Adopting new varieties means purchasing different inputs. Improving water management means installing infrastructure. Transitioning to climate-resilient practices means changing operations during the transition period — a time when income may temporarily decline before the benefits materialise.

Climate resilience, in practice, is a credit product. A farmer who cannot borrow to invest in adaptation cannot adapt. A smallholder who faces a drought without access to emergency working capital is forced into informal borrowing at rates that undermine the very resilience the climate plan aims to build.

The EU's €80 million ASPIRE-AT commitment, IFAD's $49 million co-financing, and the government's own policy ambitions all point in the same direction: the Kingdom is investing heavily in agricultural modernisation. But investment programmes need a mechanism to ensure that capital reaches the right farmers at the right terms. That mechanism is credit intelligence.

Where AGXL Fits

AGXL is building agricultural credit intelligence infrastructure for exactly this stage of market development — where government policy is supportive, international capital is committed, the cooperative ecosystem is growing, and the only missing piece is the system that turns farming behaviour into bankable credit profiles.

The OrganicCreditScore™ generates creditworthiness assessments based on how farmers actually operate: their production consistency, cooperative participation, seasonal management, input usage, and engagement over time. Not bank statements. Not collateral. Not credit history that does not exist for two million farming households.

For Cambodia's microfinance institutions, this means a tool for agricultural lending that is calibrated to farming realities — seasonal cash flows, crop cycles, and the structured production patterns that predict repayment behaviour. For cooperatives, it means turning member activity into credit readiness. For development programmes investing hundreds of millions of euros in agricultural modernisation, it means a layer of credit intelligence that makes those investments measurable and accountable.

Cambodia has the exports. It has the government commitment. It has the international capital. It has the agricultural census. What it needs now is the credit intelligence layer that connects two million productive farming households to the formal financial system.

That is what AGXL is building.

AGXL GROUP LTD is an AI-powered infrastructure technology company providing institutional-grade credit intelligence for smallholder farmers in emerging markets. AGXL is live in Laos, and the Philippines. Learn more at agxl.ai.