Economic Access, Social Capital, and Household Food Security among Smallholder Farmers in Lafia, Nigeria: Evidence on Income, Cooperative Membership, and Agricultural Support Services

Household food-security status and its socioeconomic correlates in a rapidly changing secondary-city economy were studied for across-century farming households in Lafia Local Government Area (LGA), Nasarawa State, Nigeria, from the resource perspective of food access. Data were obtained at the macro-level through a structured questionnaire and a multistage household-sampling procedure with a cross-sectional design. While the thesis documented the sampling universe and a target sample of 400, 120 consistent observations across the socioeconomic (Table 1) and food-security (Table 2) were used in all the thesis econometric tables (hence journal article), then the inconsistency was noted as a data-quality limitation. Food security status was measured through an expenditure index with two thirds of mean monthly per-capita food expenditure, then descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression selected. 74 (61.7%) households were food secure (hidden in Table 2), while 46 (38.3%) were food insecure (naked in Table 2), in general. The majorities of respondents were small farm operators of 1-3 ha (76.7%), relied on family farms for their food (85.0%), and were noncooperative members (75.8%). Total household annual income and cooperative membership were the only statistically significant positive predictors of food security, while the rest (educational attainment, years of farming experience, farm size, and household size) were positive but statistically insignificant and extension contact and gender were negative and insignificant. The results underscore purchasing power and cooperative based social capital in income-generating activities (credit, inputs, information, markets, and food). Therefore, the author advocates income-diversification, inclusive cooperative development, integrated financial and extension services, and institutionalization of food-security measurement, but the model should be re-estimated with respondent-level data in the journal article.