Agriculture as a Tool for Economic Development in Nigeria: An Assessment of Problems and Prospects in Gombe State (original) (raw)

Agricultural development in Nigeria: the constraints and potentials

2014

Despite numerous attempts by urban and regional planners to develop societies and make their environments conducive for living, livelihood in some parts of the world remains miserable due to chaos and social unrest. The continuous socio-economic and political unrest that enveloped most under developed world has been attributed to poverty. A number of attempts have been made around the world to overcome poverty but mostly have been in vain. This is most likely due to non-utilization of effective means of poverty eradication. History has revealed that agricultural development has been the best approach for improving living standard of the citizenry. Creation of agricultural villages enables the realization of objectives of rural planning by stimulating economic growth, jobs creation and improving living standard. This research was carried out by reviewing literatures on agricultural development in Nigeria, simple GIS analysis and a simplified survey approach. Problems and challenges o...

Challenges and Prospects of Agriculture in Nigeria: The Way Forward

Over the past three decades, Nigerian government had initiated a plethora of policies and programmes which were aimed at restoring agricultural sector to its pride of place in the economy. However various efforts at promoting investment and export diversification in the agricultural sector have not yielded appreciable dividend. Enormous investment and export diversification potentials for generating higher growth in the economy have remained unlocked and unexploited in the agriculture due to a host of constraining factors that must be removed. Therefore, the paper identified the constraints and proffered policy prescriptions to be implemented to remove them so as to fast track the attainment of poverty reduction and rapid economic development in the country. The identified constraints included marketing problem, infrastructure inadequacies, and unstable input and output prices. Policy actions for removing the constraints must include improvement in downstream commodity activities, environmental management, increased funding and efficiency in agricultural spending. Government must invest heavily in rural infrastructure and such investment must ensure development of infrastructure in the rural area.

Improved Agriculture: A Mechanism to Attaining Food Security in Nigeria

2017

Food is one of the most basic needs necessary for human survival and is achieved through qualitative feeding practices. Achieving food security in its totality continues to be a challenge not only to the developing nations, but also to the developed world. Nigeria is becoming more dependent on external sources to feed her citizens epitomized in the level of importation of foreign food items into the nation. Poverty, in conjunction with inadequate state action mitigating the effects of poverty, is the primary cause of hunger and food insecurity. How the nation could extricate itself from food insecurity was suggested as the improvement of agricultural practices. Nigeria possesses the capacity to be food secured if the enabling environment is created for the peasant farmers to operate in their farming activities through the following strategies via rural development, easy access to basic farm inputs, adequate budgetary allocations, appropriate policies for food sub-sector, political s...

Agriculture and Poverty Reduction in Nigeria; A Review

A strong agricultural sector provides food for the country " s increasing population, employment opportunities; generate foreign exchange and raw material to industries. This paper reviewed the role of agriculture towards poverty reduction in Nigeria. The aim of this paper is to assess the importance of agriculture to alleviation in Nigeria. The Nigerian agricultural sector has been an important sector in the economy both in the past and present because it provides employment opportunities, eradicates poverty and contribute to the growth of the economy. It was revealed from the review that more than 70% of Nigerians were poor in the year 2001 and more than 60% in 2010. The review showed that more than 60% of Nigerians were employed in agricultural sector. Improving agriculture will help to create jobs which will lead to poverty reduction. A unit change in agricultural output will cause 34.4% change in GDP. The Nigerian capital expenditure on agriculture has been declining which reduces the effectiveness of increase in agricultural output to the reduction of poverty. It was revealed that the incidence of poverty increased from 54% in 2009 to 69% in 2012. The review concluded that, agriculture is very significant in poverty reduction via income generation and job creation. It was recommended by the paper that Government should improve agricultural productivity, increase agricultural capital expenditure and improve marketing activities for agricultural output.

Nigeria’s Agriculture and Food Security Challenges

2005

Nigeria has the ambition of diversifying her economy from crude petroleum dependency. The country also faces a looming food security crisis with a growing population becoming increasingly dependent on imported foods. At the same time, the once dominant subsistence-oriented farm economy is at risk of gradual marginalization. Insecure land tenure, scarcity of funds and credit, labour scarcity despite overall high unemployment and stagnant technology have crippled its further development. Until today, a wide range of policies, programmes and projects have had limited impact in ameliorating these problems. Given the choice, young people from the rural areas rather try their luck in urban centres. Imagine... Kaduna, Abuja and Onitsha are mega cities like Lagos with populations over 12 million people. They are supplied with food made-in-Nigeria, some of it coming from urban agriculture on roof tops and gardens along railand waterways. A rail and road network that picks up food where it is...

CONSTRAINTS TO INCREASED FOOD PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION IN DUKKU L.G. A. GOMBE STATE, NIGERIA

Agriculture plays a significant role in the process of economic growth and development of Nigeria. It contributes greatly to the provision of food and raw industrial materials. Increased food production and distribution has been a significant challenge in most of the developing countries of the world. In Nigeria, several rural communities in most of the states, Northern Nigeria in particular are faced with this problem. The situation in Dukku Local Government Area of Gombe State is not an exception as food production and distribution in the area has been hampered with a lot of challenges. The study examines the constraints to increased food production and distribution in Dukku L.G.A. A total of 150 copies of questionnaires were administered to purposively sampled population of food crop farmers in six political wards. Systematic sampling technique was employed whereby the first household on every identified street was selected and the interval often(10 th) household was taken to form then th where the questionnaire was administered. Both primary and secondary source of data were used to collect the data for the research. Chisquare(x 2) was adopted to test the research hypothesis. The result shows that majority of the farmers in the study area encountered problems in food production and distribution which include: inadequate fertilizer, poor market price, poor transportation system and storage facilities. The study recommended that government should improve the supply of fertilizers and other inputs at a subsidised rates to farmers and establish an extension program in which the farmers will gain knowledge on agriculture as well as improve on the transportation system and market efficiency.