Effect of armed banditry on production activities of rural Farming Households in Niger State, Nigeria

Abstract

Armed banditry as a global pandemic has a crippling social, political and economic consequence that tends to be threatening the overall developmental efforts of the affected areas. The aim of this study is to examine the effect of banditry activities on livelihood of farming households in Niger state, Nigeria. A multi-stage purposive sampling technique was adopted, and data were collected from 150 respondents using a semi-structured questionnaire and analysed using descriptive statistics, and OLS regression model. The study showed that majority of the respondents (63.3%) were married, and their predominant age mean of 43 years. In terms of educational attainment, (86.0%) of the respondents had formal education. The results shows that farmers are more engage in maize farming (100%), and livestock farming (100%), compared to 64.9%, and 28.2%, during banditry activities respectively in the study area respectively. While agro-processing (64.1%), artisanal (53.5%) and transportation (46.9%) as the off-farm livelihood strategies used by the farmers before the incidents of banditry compared to 2.4%, 50.6% and 3.3% during banditry activities respectively. The result shows that banditry creates an atmosphere of fear and insecurity for farmers to sustain cultivation (X=3.71) and banditry disrupts field work and production activities thus limiting output (X=3.68), were the major perceived effect of banditry on production activities of the rural households in the study area. The OLS regression model result shows that limited produce for family survival, incidence of rape by bandit, increased cost of food, value of livestock rustled, member of households’ force to migrate, insecurity and household member used as labour. The result concludes that there is low production activities of the faming households during the incidence of banditry activities in the study area. Recommendations made based on the findings of this study include Extension workers should assist farmers to form viable co-operative associations, government at all levels should put in place functional security system like community policing to supplement the operations of other security agencies.