URBANIZATION AND HOUSEHOLD FOOD SECURITY IN LAFIA LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA, NASARAWA STATE, NIGERIA: A GEOSPATIAL AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC ANALYSIS, 1984–2024

The rapid pace of urbanization is in the emergent secondary cities of Nigeria altering their peri-urban zones and reconfiguring the food-security trajectories of the urban dwellers living within. This paper explores the relationship between urban land-use change and household food security in Lafia Local Government Area (LGA), including its dwellers’ socio-economic parameters, over a forty-year time frame (1984 - 2024). Multi-temporal Landsat images (1984, 2004, 2014 and 2024) were subjected to supervised maximum-likelihood classification to delineate five LULC classes, while a structured questionnaire administered to a sample size of 400 households (selected statistically by the Taro Yamane formula, for socio-economic data and expenditures) produced indicators of their food security status using expenditure-based food security indices and identified its socio-economic predictors by binary logit regression. The results reveal an unrelenting increase in the built-up area and reduction in farmland and vegetation cover from 1984 to 2024, reflective of succumbing to un-coordinated urban encroachment into native production territory. Based on 2004-2014 expenditure-based food security indices, 61.7% of the various household representatives were food secure while 38.3% were food insecure, with annual household income and membership in a cooperative society being the most significant predictors of the outcome. It was ascertained that several aspects of urban expansion in Lafia substantially led to reductions in food system components of local urban residents, but that income diversification and social capital built on membership of cooperative societies are strategic pathways to household food security in such contexts. Food-sensitive LULC zoning, periodic LULC monitoring and targeted agricultural-extension programs are recommended.