An Appraisal Of The National Special Programme On Food Security In Abia State, Nigeria

ABSTRACT

 Various strategies are being adopted to raise agricultural growth and increase food security as well as empower farmers in agricultural activities. This study appraised the performance of the pilot stage of the National Special Programme on Food Security (NSPFS) in Abia state. Data was collected from three (3) blocks of NSPFS sites in Aba, Ohafia and Umuahia agricultural zones of the State. Eighty-five farmers were randomly selected from each zone, which gave a total of 255 beneficiary farmers used for the study. The results revealed that 43.5 percent of the beneficiaries were women whose ages ranged from 31-50 years. Eighty eight percent were married while 234 farmers had farm sizes that ranged between 0.1 - 1.5 hectares. One hundred and thirty eight beneficiaries had farming experience of less than 10 years, while 212 respondents had formal education. Crop intensification accounted for 56.1 percent of farm practices introduced to the communities. Other information obtained from the study, showed that 74.1 percent of the farmers received inadequate training on utilization of farm practices. Participation of farmers in the programme attained medium rating on the score range of 1.4 - 2.7 based on the "interval mid point method" for calculating the mean of grouped data. Result from paired t - test statistics revealed a significant difference in crop intensification (t9.65), livestock diversification (t=-9.29), Agro processing (t-6.02) and fisheries (t5.89), and no significant difference in water-irrigated farming (t=1 .57). There was also a significant difference in the farm size (t=-21.0) and socio-economic status (t=- 45.6) of farmers. The problem of insufficient training on utilization of modules introduced, accounted for 14.9 percent of the problems encountered by the farmers, with lack of storage facilities and lack of crop and livestock specialist being the least of the problems with 5.5 percent respectively. It is therefore recommended that NSPFS should be reinvigorated in the framework of Research-Extension-FarmersInput/Marketing System (REFILS) to train farmers on utilization of new and improved technologies as well as provision and availability of farm inputs so as to enhance the performance of the programme in its replication and expansion stages.