Microfinance and Agricultural Extension Services
Module 3
From Grameen's group lending to the Andhra Pradesh crisis and IDE Nepal's smallholder ecosystem, this lesson covers how credit and agricultural extension services can serve the poor without exploiting them.
1. Microfinance for the Underserved
Job Deficits and Distress Entrepreneurship
In countries like India, formal job creation is insufficient to meet the demands of the growing young population. This deficit is highly concentrated in rural villages, which do not generate adequate employment opportunities. Consequently, many individuals are forced to become entrepreneurs out of sheer necessity rather than choice, a phenomenon known as distress entrepreneurship.
Unlike conventional high-valuation start-up founders, distress entrepreneurs run very small micro-enterprises, such as roadside eateries, small trading shops, vegetable pushcarts, or animal husbandry ventures. These micro-enterprises require an initial capital investment before they can generate any revenue. For example, a pushcart vendor must buy vegetables first thing in the morning before making sales.
The Debt Trap and Banking Barriers
Poor individuals struggle to find affordable capital to finance their businesses. Beyond credit, they require risk-protection products, such as crop, health, or animal insurance, to safeguard against rainfall failure or health crises. They also need pension plans for old age when physical labor is no longer possible.
In the late 1990s in Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus, an economist who founded Grameen Bank, observed this struggle among poor women basket weavers. Before Grameen, organizations like BRAC, a not-for-profit, were already lending small sums. Yunus noted that basket weavers had to buy raw materials but lacked cash. They relied on local money lenders who charged exorbitant rates, leaving them perpetually indebted. Despite borrowing a collective sum of only 27 US dollars for 42 people, these weavers remained trapped in generational debt. Formal banks flatly refused to lend to the poor because they lacked collateral and credit histories.
2. Economic Dependence and Lending
Information Asymmetry and Credit Risks
Lending to the poor involves significant information asymmetry, where the lender lacks sufficient data about the borrower. This creates two primary credit risks: adverse selection and moral hazard.
| Credit Risk | Definition | Cause and Effect Relationship |
|---|---|---|
| Adverse Selection | An information asymmetry problem occurring when a lender cannot verify a borrower's credit history. | In the absence of credit histories, lenders assume the worst-case scenario, evaluating healthy or low-risk borrowers as highly risky, which results in either a refusal to lend or the charging of extremely high interest rates. |
| Moral Hazard | An information asymmetry problem occurring when a lender cannot monitor a borrower's behavior after credit is disbursed. | Because poor borrowers lack physical collateral, the lender assumes they will act recklessly with the funds, which increases the likelihood of business failure and loan default. |
Memory hook: Adverse selection = "before the loan" (cannot screen the borrower). Moral hazard = "after the loan" (cannot monitor behavior). Both stem from information asymmetry.
Risk Management by Informal Lenders
Informal money lenders successfully overcome adverse selection and moral hazard through operational advantages that formal banks lack.
| Parameter | Formal Banks | Informal Money Lenders |
|---|---|---|
| Information Gathering | Rely on structured risk profiles and formal credit histories. | Maintain intimate, localized knowledge of borrowers and spend time visiting their homes. |
| Recourse and Security | Demand physical assets, such as houses or cars, as collateral. | Leverage interlinked transactions where the borrower is already economically dependent on them for employment or farm-output sales. |
| Fairness and Transparency | Regulated interest rates, but flatly reject small-value transactions. | Charge extremely high, usurious interest rates, exploit borrowers, and maintain non-transparent loan-recovery terms. |
Sustainability Calculations and Poverty Penalty
To operate a sustainable lending business for the poor, a formal institution must calculate its interest rate based on two primary costs. Let X represent the high transaction costs of credit assessment and monitoring. Let Y% represent the borrowing interest rate the institution pays to secure capital, since they cannot take deposits.
The minimum sustainable interest rate charged to the poor must exceed X + Y%. To cover the risk of default in the absence of collateral, the rate is often increased even further. This dynamic results in a poverty penalty, where the poor pay higher unit costs for capital, energy, or basic commodities compared to affluent consumers who buy in larger volumes.
3. The Classic Grameen MFI Model
Group Lending and Peer Monitoring
To bypass the lack of collateral, Muhammad Yunus developed a group-lending model based on community-level social capital.
| Model Feature | Operational Mechanism | Key Function and Economic Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Self-Selected Groups | Neighbors organize into small groups of people who know and trust one another. | Minimizes adverse selection by pushing credit risk assessment down to the community itself. |
| Revolving Credit | Loans are disbursed to one group member at a time: once the first member repays, the next in line receives capital. | Minimizes moral hazard: group members ensure no one defaults because a single default halts credit access for the entire group. |
| Peer Screening | The group collectively evaluates and approves the loan proposals of its members. | Ensures funds are used for productive, income-generating micro-enterprises rather than consumption. |
Operational Structure and Scaling
The Grameen Bank model relies on highly standardized, decentralized administrative layers.
- Field Workers: Microfinance Institution (MFI) field agents work directly with groups, offering investment advice and monitoring repayment during weekly meetings.
- Centers and Branches: Multiple groups roll up into centers, which run weekly meetings and approve loan proposals under field agent supervision. Centers roll up into branches, forming a scalable, corporate enterprise.
- Standardization: Loan sizes, repayment schedules (typically 50 weekly installments), agent commissions, and membership fees are completely standardized to lower transaction costs and increase predictability.
- Internal Savings: Members make regular, standardized savings. This corpus is circulated internally, lowering Grameen's external borrowing costs.
Financial Performance and Gender Focus
Grameen Bank is structured as a bank by and for the poor. It was established by a special act of parliament in Bangladesh, with 94% of its equity owned by its poor female borrowers and 6% owned by the government.
By mid-2024, Grameen had lent over 38 billion dollars to 10.6 million borrowers, 97% of whom were women, across more than 80,000 villages, positively impacting 45 million people. Its repayment rate exceeds 96%, with non-performing assets (NPAs) capped at 3% to 4%, outperforming major global commercial banks like Citibank or Wells Fargo.
Yunus prioritized lending to women because they take greater responsibility for running families, are more stationary, and represent a lower default risk compared to men. The bank focuses on financial viability and modest profitability to ensure long-term sustainability rather than profit maximization.
4. Evolution of the Grameen Model
Transition to Grameen II
While standardized operations initially minimized transaction costs, they lacked resilience against environmental shocks. In 1998, severe floods and cyclones in Bangladesh caused widespread defaults due to circumstances beyond the borrowers' control. This forced the transition to Grameen II, a more flexible model.
| Operational Parameter | Classic Grameen Model | Grameen II (Flexible Model) |
|---|---|---|
| Disbursement & Installments | Highly standardized: typically 50 fixed weekly installments. | Discretionary: field agents customize loan size and installment schedules to match individual cash-flow patterns (e.g., daily payments for vendors, seasonal harvest-linked payments for farmers). |
| Debt Management | Rigid repayment rules with no individual rescheduling. | Rescheduling options are provided if a borrower experiences genuine economic distress. |
| Savings Infrastructure | Group-level shared accounts. | Replaced group funds with personal savings accounts, pension funds, and loan insurance to protect families in the event of a borrower's death. |
Grameen combined these flexible financial instruments with the 16 Decisions, a set of developmental guidelines: keeping families small, ensuring children stay in school, building robust houses, rejecting dowry, and keeping water and the environment clean.
Self-Help Group Bank Linkages in India
Unlike Grameen Bank, Indian MFIs were historically structured as non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) and could not legally accept public deposits. To fund operations, they had to borrow capital from private sources or venture capitalists, incurring high interest expenses. Consequently, they charged poor borrowers rates ranging from 24% to over 50%.
To address these high capital costs, India innovated the Self-Help Group (SHG) Bank Linkage program, mediated by grassroot non-profits.
| Program Stage | Operational Mechanism | Key Function and Structural Limits |
|---|---|---|
| SHG Formation | Non-profits organize small groups of poor women to save collectively for the first 6 months. | Establishes financial discipline and creates an internal lending corpus. |
| Bank Linkage | Public sector and Regional Rural Banks match the group's accumulated savings corpus with bank credit. | The savings corpus acts as informal collateral, allowing banks to lend to the group at affordable rates (around 8%). |
| Internal Lending | The SHG lends these bank funds internally to its members at a higher, self-determined rate. | Generated interest is shared among members, reinforcing their collective savings capital. |
| Inherent Limits | Bank credit is capped as a direct multiple of the SHG's internal savings. | Because poor women have low savings capacity, the capital raised is minimal, limiting scale. Groups are also vulnerable to local political and caste factions. |
Commercialization and Venture Capital Pressure
Due to the scale limitations of SHGs, commercially oriented MFIs expanded rapidly in India. Because they could not take deposits, they attracted private equity and venture capital. Venture capitalists demanded rapid growth and high returns, forcing MFIs to maximize profitability.
MFIs, such as SKS Microfinance, justified charging high interest rates (24% to 50%) by arguing that poor families invest in high-return assets. For example, they calculated that buying a goat and selling its milk and offspring could yield a return on investment (ROI) of 30% to 100%. This commercial drive expanded the industry rapidly: by 2010, the Indian micro-lending sector held a loan portfolio of 30,000 crores (7 billion US dollars), covering 30 million borrowers.
5. Why Responsible Lending Matters
The Andhra Pradesh Over-Leveraging Crisis
By 2010, the aggressive focus on rapid scaling led to a severe credit crisis in Andhra Pradesh, where microfinance clients as a percentage of poor households reached 935%. This meant that on average, every poor household held more than 9 concurrent loans from different MFIs.
The systemic collapse occurred through a defined cause-and-effect logic chain:
- Incentive Dilution: Driven by volume-based sales incentives, MFI field agents bypassed credit evaluations and joint-liability screening, assuming that if another MFI had lent to a household, the borrower was creditworthy.
- Over-Leveraging: Poor households took multiple loans simultaneously, using credit from one MFI to pay off outstanding debt at another.
- Credit Freeze: Once borrowers became over-leveraged and MFIs refused further credit, families returned to informal money lenders to avoid defaulting.
- Coercive Recovery: Money lenders used harsh, coercive, and informal recovery methods to reclaim their capital.
- Industry Collapse: The severe financial distress and resulting wave of suicides led the government to ban all MFI operations in 2010-2011. Field agents were blocked from collecting loans, causing the entire Indian MFI industry to collapse.
Systemic Collapse and Lessons on Mission Drift
The collapse highlighted key microfinance vulnerabilities:
- The Vulnerability Gap: Rich individuals can recover from bad financial decisions, but the poor lack safety nets. Selling complex financial instruments to populations with low financial literacy is highly dangerous.
- Mission Dilution: Pressure to scale and deliver high valuations to commercial, non-social investors dilutes the social mission, leading to operational shortcuts and poor borrower outcomes.
- Integrated Literacy: Microlending must be paired with financial literacy and product monitoring to ensure funds are used productively.
6. Technology-Enabled Social Lending
Government Inclusion Frameworks
Following the MFI collapse, the Government of India launched major financial inclusion initiatives to expand credit access safely.
- PMJDY (Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana): A mission-mode program that opened 550 million bank accounts, focusing on rural areas (60%) and women (50%).
- Banking Correspondent Model: Local agents equipped with digital point-of-service devices traveled door-to-door, providing doorstep banking to remote, rural areas while lowering transaction costs.
- JAM Trinity (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile): Combined bank accounts (Jan Dhan), biometric digital identity (Aadhaar), and mobile phone access to enable direct benefit transfers (DBTs). This digital transparency reduced corruption and financial leakage.
While government data indicates the JAM Trinity reduced informal credit dependency to 20%, independent sources note that up to 50% of PMJDY accounts remain inoperative due to a lack of money or financial literacy. Consequently, nearly 50% of credit for the poor still comes from informal sources, with 60% of that sourced from money lenders in a 100 billion dollar unorganized lending market.
Case Study: Rang De Microlending Platform
Founded in 2008 by Ramakrishna and Smita, Rang De is an internet-based, peer-to-peer (P2P) social lending platform. Inspired by Grameen Bank and Kiva, the founders sought to use technology to connect individual and corporate lenders with poor borrowers, bypassing commercial financial intermediaries. By leveraging an online platform, Rang De minimized borrowing and transaction costs, allowing them to lower interest rates for poor borrowers. To manage local borrower identification and risk profiling, Rang De partnered with grassroot not-for-profits who work directly with underserved communities.
7. Rang De: Adapting for Greater Impact
Financial Model and Fee Structure
Rang De established a low-cost, transparent interest rate structure averaging 8.5%.
| Interest Component | Allocation (%) | Recipient and Operational Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Field Partner Incentive | 5.0% | Distributed to grassroot NGO partners for identifying, evaluating, and training borrowers. |
| Lender Return | 2.0% | Paid back to social investors who provide low-cost capital. |
| Platform Margin | 1.0% to 1.5% | Retained by Rang De to cover its digital administrative and operational expenses. |
Social investors provide capital to generate positive social impact rather than financial return. Many reinvest their principal and refuse to accept interest. Investors are encouraged to visit borrowers, turning them into volunteers and evangelists who raise funds, leverage social media, and access corporate social responsibility (CSR) budgets.
Technology Integration and Mission Preservation
Rang De utilizes custom IT platforms and dashboards to automate loan tracking, display transparent repayment rates, and evaluate field partner performance. This automation reduced loan processing and disbursement times from 20 days to 7 days, significantly lowering transaction costs.
To prevent multiple borrowing and mission drift, Rang De enforces strict operational guardrails:
- Underserved Targeting: 88% of loans are disbursed in areas where other MFIs have only 1% to 2% penetration, and 50% of borrowers are first-time borrowers.
- B2B Direct Lending: Bypasses field partner fees by lending directly to Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) and Self-Help Groups, reducing borrower interest rates.
- Mandatory Literacy: Borrowers must complete financial literacy training before they can receive their first loan.
- Product Customization: Replaced standardized loans with customized lending products that adjust repayment schedules to the borrower's specific cash-flow patterns.
8. The Impact of Sustainable Microfinance
The Reach vs. Richness IT Platform Debate
Although Rang De achieved a visitor-to-investor conversion rate of 7% to 8% (which is well above average), the platform was not self-sustainable. It required continuous corporate donations, CSR funds, and grants to cover its fixed operational expenses.
This shortfall highlights the classic reach versus richness debate in information technology. While digital platforms are highly efficient at expanding "reach" (connecting large numbers of people at low cost), they struggle to transmit "richness" (complex, emotional, and tacit information). Because lending money at low interest rates for social good is a highly personal and emotional decision, it relies on human empathy, face-to-face interaction, and immediate expressions of gratitude, all of which are absent on an impersonal digital platform.
Institutional Guardrails for Responsible Lending
| Guardrail Parameter | Operational Requirement | Cause and Effect Relationship |
|---|---|---|
| Moderation and Transparency | Maintain moderate salary caps, modest profit distribution, and clear fee disclosures. | Prevents commercial growth and profit-seeking from overshadowing the core developmental mission. |
| Humane Loan Recovery | Employ flexible, context-sensitive recovery methods. | Restructuring or rescheduling loans during natural disasters or family emergencies prevents borrower default and financial ruin. |
| Due Diligence and Checking | Enforce rigorous verification procedures to verify borrowing histories. | Prevents multiple borrowing and over-leveraging, ensuring that loans are used productively. |
Field studies on whether microfinance directly eradicates poverty remain mixed and inconclusive. However, sustainable microfinance has generated significant positive impacts, including creating consistent cash flows, facilitating agrarian income diversification (e.g., transition from vegetable cultivation to dairy farming), empowering women by reducing disguised unemployment, and putting downward pressure on informal money lenders.
9. Transforming Lives Through Agriculture
Indian Agricultural Constraints
While 65% of India's population lives in rural villages, agriculture contributes only 17% to 18% of GDP, resulting in severe disguised unemployment.
| Agricultural Constraint | Key Operational Challenge | Economic Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Monsoon Dependence | Lack of regular irrigation infrastructure leaves farms highly vulnerable to droughts or heavy rains. | Causes low farm productivity and highly volatile farmer incomes. |
| Small Landholdings | 80% of Indian farms are smaller than 5 acres (known as smallholder farms). In comparison, smallholder rates are 98% in China, 96% in Bangladesh, and 87% in Ethiopia. | Small land sizes prevent the use of large-scale mechanization like tractors due to a lack of efficient scale. |
| Poverty Penalty and Information Gaps | Smallholders have low bargaining power, lack access to cheap inputs, and lack information on market prices and crop management. | Farmers buy inputs at high prices and grow low-value grains (rice, wheat, corn) earning less than $200 per acre. |
| Supply Chain Inefficiencies | Weak storage and transport infrastructure require multiple handovers. | Inefficient supply chains allow middle-men to extract the majority of the value from crop sales. |
Smallholder Dynamics in Nepal
In Nepal, where 25% of the population survives on less than 50 US cents a day, poverty is exacerbated by earthquakes, civil wars, undernourishment, outdated farming methods, and mountainous, landlocked terrain. Poverty rates increase with the height of the terrain.
Smallholders cultivating their own land have a unique economic advantage: because they use family labor, they incur zero monitoring or agency costs. To capitalize on this low-cost family labor, smallholders need low-cost irrigation tools to grow off-season vegetables, which are highly labor-intensive and yield higher profits than grains.
10. How IDE Worked for Smallholders
R&D and the Supplier Dilemma
Commercial firms ignore smallholders because they are highly fragmented and have limited purchasing power, resulting in a low return on investment (ROI) for R&D. IDE, an international not-for-profit, designed contextualized, low-cost irrigation equipment, such as treadle pumps, drip irrigation, and multi-user storage systems. IDE did not patent its designs to keep manufacturing costs low and enable local adaptation.
IDE trained local entrepreneurs to manufacture its irrigation tools but faced a supplier density dilemma.
| Strategy | Advantage | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| High Supplier Density | Encourages price competition, lowering equipment costs for poor smallholders. | Excessive competition reduces supplier margins, making manufacturing unprofitable. |
| Low Supplier Density | Guarantees high profitability for manufacturers, securing tool availability. | Risk of monopolistic pricing and supplier exploitation of smallholders. |
IDE balanced this trade-off by limiting supplier numbers for complex products while continually supplying design upgrades to keep prices fair and suppliers profitable.
Advisory and Farming Systems
IDE provided smallholders with direct advisory and agricultural extension services:
- Crop Selection: Advised smallholders to transition from low-value grains to high-value, labor-intensive off-season vegetables, which could be sold locally or exported to India.
- Diversification: Encouraged farmers to construct fish ponds to secure an additional, low-effort source of income.
- Productivity Inputs: Provided training on crop management, water distribution, and the optimal use of fertilizers and pesticides.
11. Building a Sustainable Agricultural Ecosystem
Upstream and Downstream Aggregation
IDE realized that providing irrigation tools alone was insufficient to make smallholders financially viable. It evolved to orchestrate the entire agricultural value chain.
| Value Chain Segment | IDE Aggregation Strategy | Economic Mechanism & Power Balance |
|---|---|---|
| Upstream (Input Markets) | Collective buying of seeds, fertilizers, and tools. | Aggregates individual demand to increase the farmers' bargaining power and lower prices. |
| Production Process | Disaggregated, decentralized production with family labor. | Maintains zero agency and monitoring costs, keeping operating costs low. |
| Downstream (Output Markets) | Collectivization of farm outputs through joint storage and collection centers. | Increases bargaining power in front of logistics providers, distributors, and exporters. |
Community Governance and Partnerships
Because IDE operates on short-term, donor-funded projects (3 to 5 years), it must build self-sufficient communities. It created local marketing and planning committees (MPCs) and encouraged representation from marginalized women and lower castes to build inclusive local governance structures.
IDE acted as a bridging mechanism between smallholders and the government. The government possessed resources and infrastructure, while IDE possessed local context knowledge and social mobilization capability. IDE absorbed transaction costs for public banks by helping farmers fill out loan applications, organizing group credit applications, and taking bank officials on project site visits, which reduced credit friction.
Under Professor Moore's 1993 business ecosystem theory, organizations survive by co-evolving capacities with partners rather than working in isolation. In institutional voids with high transaction costs, a facilitator is required to build self-sustaining linkages.
12. Evaluating IDE's Business Model
Transitioning to For-Profit Models
To transition IDE Nepal into a self-sustaining inclusive business model, three primary commercial strategies can be implemented:
- Equipment Sales: Sell R&D tools and irrigation equipment directly to smallholders at a sustainable profit margin.
- Advisory Fee-for-Service: Charge smallholders direct fees for agronomic extension services and productivity training.
- Linkage Service Fees: Charge a small service fee for connecting farmer groups to government subsidy and credit schemes, similar to the model used by Seva Setu in India.
Not-for-Profit vs. For-Profit Trade-offs
| Evaluation Parameter | Not-for-Profit Model (Donor Dependent) | For-Profit Model (Market Driven) |
|---|---|---|
| Depth of Inclusivity | Reaches the poorest of the poor regardless of their immediate ability to pay. | Constrained by payment viability: must restrict services to clients who can afford to pay (similar to Vaatsalya). |
| R&D and Innovation | Invests in long-term, non-market R&D and open-sources technology to keep equipment cheap. | Surplus-constrained: cannot invest heavily in long-term R&D due to low profit margins. |
| Social Mobilization | Focuses on inclusive community governance, caste and gender equity, and local independence. | Commercial incentive is to maintain community dependency on the enterprise to secure repeat sales. |
| Government Legitimacy | High social legitimacy: governments cooperate easily because private individuals do not enrich themselves. | Low social legitimacy: governments are skeptical because profits enrich private owners. |
Ultra-Quick Revision (Exam Essentials)
Key Concepts & Distinctions
| Concept Pair | Core Distinction | Key Takeaway |
|---|---|---|
| Adverse Selection vs. Moral Hazard | Adverse selection is a pre-contractual information gap (not knowing if a borrower is creditworthy). Moral hazard is a post-contractual gap (not knowing if they will behave recklessly after receiving the funds). | Both are caused by information asymmetry and are mitigated in MFIs by group lending and peer monitoring. |
| Standardized vs. Flexible Microcredit | Standardized lending relies on rigid rules (e.g., 50 weekly installments) to lower transaction costs. Flexible lending (Grameen II) adjusts installment sizes and durations to borrower cash flows. | Standardized models are efficient but highly vulnerable to environmental shocks. Flexible models are more resilient. |
| NBFC MFIs vs. Grameen Bank | Grameen Bank is a licensed bank that takes deposits, lowering its cost of capital. Indian MFIs operate as Non-Banking Finance Companies (NBFCs) and cannot take public deposits. | NBFCs must borrow from expensive private capital markets, forcing them to charge high interest rates (24% to 50%). |
| SHG Linkage vs. Joint-Liability Groups | SHG Linkage requires 6 months of collective savings to match bank credit. Joint-liability groups (Grameen) do not require physical or cash collateral, relying on peer pressure and sequential lending. | SHG is lower risk but constrained by the low savings capacity of the poor. Grameen scales more rapidly. |
| Upstream vs. Downstream Aggregation | Upstream aggregation collectivizes demand to buy inputs (seeds, fertilizers) cheaply. Downstream aggregation collectivizes output (joint storage, centers) to increase bargaining power with distributors. | In between, the production process remains decentralized to preserve the low-cost family labor advantage. |
Must-Know Terms
- Distress Entrepreneurship: Micro-enterprises started out of absolute survival necessity due to a lack of formal employment options.
- Poverty Penalty: The higher unit cost or premium paid by the poor for goods, services, or capital due to fragmentation, lack of credit history, or small purchasing volumes.
- Transaction Costs: The fixed operational costs (credit assessment, administration, physical infrastructure) incurred to execute a transaction, making small-value loans unprofitable for traditional banks.
- Interlinked Transactions: A risk-mitigation strategy where informal lenders secure loan repayment by linking credit to other transactions (e.g., land tenancy, employment, or output sales).
- Over-Leveraging: The condition where a borrower holds multiple concurrent loans from different lenders, using new debt to pay back old debt until they default.
- Mission Drift: The dilution of an organization's social objective due to commercial scaling pressures, resulting in exploitative behaviors or shortcuts.
- JAM Trinity: The unified digital infrastructure in India combining bank accounts (Jan Dhan), biometric identification (Aadhaar), and mobile access to enable direct benefit transfers.
- Reach vs. Richness: The trade-off in IT platforms where technology expands reach (connecting many users) but lacks richness (the personal, emotional depth required for high social investment conversion).
- Agency Costs: The monitoring and administrative costs incurred when employing external workers rather than family labor.
- Business Ecosystem: A network of organizations (suppliers, distributors, customers, government) co-evolving capabilities under an orchestrator to build a self-sustaining market.