期刊名称：Journal of Emerging Trends in Economics and Management Sciences
电子版ISSN：2141-7024
出版年度：2014
卷号：5
期号：3
页码：343-350
出版社：Scholarlink Resource Centre
摘要：Nigeria is currently experiencing the scourge of rising poverty and the growing threat of food insecurity amongits citizens. This situation has been seen to be especially worse in the rural areas where people’s livelihoodsdepend largely on small-scale agricultural output. This is largely due to the prevailing situation of lowavailability of productive inputs like credit, inadequate/inappropriate technology, among other issues whichaggravate the poverty and food insecurity situation in these rural areas that hold over half of the Nigerianpopulation. Past government schemes aimed at improving agricultural output and alleviating poverty have notyielded the desired results. This study therefore examined the effect of one of such schemes, the NationalSpecial Programme for Food Security (NSPFS), on the poverty status of farming households in Ido LocalGovernment Area of Oyo State. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze and compare the socioeconomiccharacteristics of beneficiary and non-beneficiary households of the NSPFS while the method of fuzzy sets wasused to compare their poverty statuses. Tobit regression analysis was used to examine the determinants ofpoverty, pooling together data for both beneficiary and non-beneficiary households. Altogether data from 104households collected through a multi-stage random sampling procedure was used for analysis. The figureincluded 52 beneficiary households and 52 non-beneficiary households. Data was collected on socio-economicvariables including age, household size, educational attainment, ownership of assets among others. The nonbeneficiaryhouseholds showed a greater multidimensional poverty depth than their beneficiary counterpartswith an Average Multidimensional Poverty Index (AMPI) of 0.3499 compared to 0.2990 for the beneficiaries.Poverty Incidence (PI) was also marginally higher among the non-beneficiaries with 44.2% being poorcompared to 38.5% of the beneficiaries. Participating in the NSPFS, age of household head, and educationalattainment all showed inverse relationships with poverty. Household size, farming experience and number ofdays of incapacitation (as a proxy for health status) all showed positive causal relationships with the dependentvariable. It was concluded that the NSPFS did have a positive effect on households’ welfare as beneficiariesshowed a smaller poverty incidence and the Tobit regression analysis result showed that participating in theNSPFS reduced the chances of being poor by 6 percent. This paper thus provides additional empirical evidenceto policy makers in Nigeria with regards to the depth and dimensions of poverty being experienced by ruralhouseholds as well as the effectiveness of policy efforts such as the NSPFS. Therefore, similar programmes tobe implemented in the future can be better directed in tackling the complex dimensions of poverty among ruralhouseholds in Nigeria.
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