Household food security and environmental management practices within settled Fulani agro-pastoral households in Ogun State

Abstract

Many approaches had been applied to increase the level of food production in developing countries as the population increases but which do not show any appreciable increase, but decline. And the Fulanis have become increasingly more settled in the southern parts of Nigeria. In adjusting to the different agro-ecological and socio-cultural background, some household food security and environmental management systems are likely to have emerged. This assumption found the basis for this study focusing on Household Food Security and Environmental Management Systems in Ogun State. Systematic random sampling technique was used in the selection of 150 agropastoral households, from the five local government areas of Ogun State, which were identified as areas where Fulani pastoralists had settled in the state.

The result showed that majority of the respondents are between the ages of 31-40 years (47.5%), have more than one wife (76.0%), had no formal education (45.5%) and has less than 4 acres farm land that are scattered. A significant percentage of the respondents are fully engaged in the production of fresh and processed milk, poultry, cattle, sheep, goat, cassava, yam, sorghum, maize and groundnut as means of ensuring household food security. While they practise bush fallowing, planting of legumes, mulching, manure, crop rotation and taungya to ensure continuous fertility of the soil on their various farms.

Therefore agropastoral households in Ogun-state require extension messages for improving their productivity in these crop and livestock activities. The policy implication of this for extension in Nigeria is the need to design locality specific extension programmes and messages.


[JEXT Vol.3 2002: 76-79]