How does nigerias geography affect agriculture

The most common type of foods is corn, yams, rice, and cassavas. These can be fried or dried and pounded into flour. The labor in Nigeria is strongly divided by gender. Women have very few political and professional careers, and those who do are greatly outnumbered and rarely move to higher levels of management.

Both men and women farm, but gender division is seen in what kind of crops they grow. For example, yams are considered a man's crop while beans and cassava are thought to be a woman's crop. The family's wealth and land are passed to the oldest male son, so it is difficult for women to gain access to finances. Women try to provide for their family by farming or selling products to local markets. Nigeria's average household contains two parents and three kids. The male is typically the head of the household, especially in urban areas.

This makes for crowded schools that are hard to get into. Health care in Nigeria is very poor. One in every six children dies before the age of five. Poor transportation adds to health problems making it difficult to get to clinics and hospitals.

Nigeria is a republic with a long history of military rule and dictatorship. The government now has two branches: a senate and a house of representatives. Each president is only allowed to serve two four-year terms.

All residents in Nigeria are able to vote at the age of eighteen and above. In , The military is the largest in West Africa consisting of an army, a navy, an air force, and a police force.

The small amount of power that the country has is decreasing due to fuel costs and the government not investing in maintenance. More people have access to clean water than electricity. Most people that have access to water get it from community wells or streams. However, 70 million people do not have safe drinking water, which is why around , children die every year from diarrhea and related diseases. With the favorable climates and a large area of arable land, farming has the potential to become immense.

The staple crops include cassava, yams, corn, coco, yams, cowpeas, beans, sweet potatoes, millet, plantains, bananas, rice, and sorghum.

Most farms are family owned and make only enough food for them or to sell locally. Farms are generally small and scattered and use simple tools and shifting cultivation. The average temperature in Nigeria is 28 degrees Celsius or Along the coast, the average precipitation is about 2,mm to 3,mm.

In some areas, the rainfall can get up to 4,mm. These high amounts of rainfall allow there to be many rainforests and swamps. In contrast, the northern areas get around mm of precipitation. This allows much of the land to be used for agriculture. The soil quality in Nigeria is rated low to medium quality for growing crops. Music and art spring from strong tribal roots and are prevalent throughout society.

At least 60 percent of Nigerians live below the poverty line, existing on less than a dollar a day. Unfair distribution of the country's oil wealth, as well as political, ethnic, and religious conflicts have put a strain on Nigerian society. High on Nigeria's southern mountains, the slopes are covered by thick rain forest. Green plants grow everywhere, broken by flashes of color from flowers, fruits, birds , and butterflies. This is the home of rare western lowland gorillas, once thought to be extinct in Nigeria.

Nigeria's diverse landscape makes it ideal for a broad range of plants and animals. Many species live nowhere else on Earth. Unfortunately there aren't very many national parks in Nigeria and competition for space with humans has left many species on the endangered list. Many years ago Nigeria's savannas teemed with giraffes , elephants , lions , cheetahs , and large herds of antelope.

Today, most of these animals have been killed by hunters or their habitats have been destroyed. Since Nigeria won independence from Britain in , it has suffered through corrupt leaders and occasional military rule.

In the country adopted a new constitution and the first democratic elections in 20 years were held. Nigeria is the most important country politically and economically in West Africa.

It is richer than all other West African nations and holds considerable power. Nigeria's most important export is oil, more than half of which is shipped to the United States.

If, as this conclusion implies, soil fertility decline can be stabilized under a high and increasing population density, then agricultural intensification is compatible with ecological sustainability in the farming system.

By contrast, in the low-density area soil fertility levels perhaps comparable to those of the high-density area are maintained by long fallow cycles, and population growth has not yet forced a transition to more intensive methods of fertility maintenance, even though about 70 percent of the area is usually excluded from farming use.

Under a regime of annual cultivation, natural woodland is gradually transformed, by the clearance, selection, protection, and planting of trees, into farmed parkland. The trees provide, among their many functions, browse for small ruminants in an integrated system of crop, livestock, and tree husbandry. Under such conditions, the density, volume, and regenerative status of the tree stock is a measure of sustainability in the system.

Under less intensive systems, the tree stock responds to population growth in different ways, because natural vegetation is more abundant. Studies of farm tree populations in two areas west and east of Kano , using sequential aerial photography and ground surveys, generated the data summarized in Table 6. Notwithstanding the differences between the values obtained for the two areas, the table shows that the farmed parkland has been sustained over three decades including two major drought cycles — and — In the western area, the density of trees actually increased between and In both areas, the ground quadrats surveyed for the wood volume estimates in and exceeded, on average, the densities obtained from aerial photography This may be due to a further increase in the numbers of trees or the inclusion of saplings not visible on the photographs.

The girth classes of trees Table 7 , taking all species together, indicate that a large proportion of the tree population belongs to the smaller classes, showing that regeneration is taking place though the distributions are strikingly different in the two areas.

However, some species are doing better than others. Trees are very sparse on rainfed farms. Woodfuel, construction timber, and other products are obtained from natural woodlands in the uncultivated lowlands.

Trees are sometimes regarded as a nuisance on farms as they may harbor bird pests. They have not, therefore, been integrated into the. Nichol, in Cline-Cole et al. Neither have livestock, which spend the greater part of the year on natural grassland, only visiting the farms when crop residues are available. In northern Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa , the transition from bush fallowing to annual cultivation normally associated with increasing population density leads to an increase in the size of trees and in timber volume per hectare Cline-Cole et al.

In the high-density area, the density and regenerative status of farm trees has been maintained over a period of three decades including two major drought cycles.

The value and multiple uses of farm trees have ensured this outcome, notwithstanding inflating woodfuel prices in nearby Metropolitan Kano.

Increased integration of farm forestry with crop and livestock husbandry is essential to the process of intensification and is consistent with an increasing density of population. In the low-density area, a lower level of integration and an underdeveloped farm forestry component reflect a lower population density a more. The evidence reviewed so far leads to the conclusion that population growth, and high population density, are compatible with sustainable resource management by smallholders.

A relationship between population growth and agricultural intensification in northern Nigeria could be inferred long before Ester Boserup's elegant statement of her hypothesis in A review of the farming system of the high-density case the Kano Close-Settled Zone , during the last three decades, concluded that it is sustainable as a system Mortimore, in press. We may now add that intensifi-. The relationship is implicit if not explicitly stated in early colonial annual reports and district assessment reports for Kano Province, for example, and even in the accounts of nineteenth-century explorers.

For an early formal statement, see Grove Ecological variation, while complicating the spatial pattern, lends further credence to the demographic hypothesis in the sense that highly productive land usually lowland is relatively scarce in relation to less productive land upland , and thus in greater demand. Scarcity has the same effect as a high population, and so consequently many of these areas have been invested in and intensively used, even under relatively low population densities.

The link between population growth and sustainable intensification is mediated by other factors that can only be briefly touched on here.

Land appropriation by governments, institutions, and capitalist farmers proceeded apace in Nigeria under the impetus of oil revenues and the making of personal fortunes in the s and s Watts, Access to land is facilitated by a land law that accords separate status to customary and statutory tenure, almost unrestricted powers to state governments' land offices to effect transfers, and by subeconomic rates of compensation paid to customary claimants.

The removal of increasing amounts of land, cultivated or uncultivated, from the stock available to the growing population of smallholders, may be expected to accelerate the effects of population growth on the use of what remains.

There is also a process of purchase, consolidation, and enlargement under customary tenure, which operates in favor of an emerging class of farmer entrepreneurs Labaran, , which is also reported on irrigation schemes. In short, a process of competitive appropriation is increasingly affecting the supply and distribution of agricultural land.

A further limitation of the demographic hypothesis of land use change arises from the fact that population growth does not translate directly into increased inputs of agricultural labor. At the level of the household, differences in access to land cause unevenness in family labor inputs.

The hiring market either corrects or accentuates such unevenness, depending on the distribution of operating capital and of household poverty within the community. Capital may be spent on hiring labor or on saving it e. This technology has contradictory effects in densely populated areas, saving labor in land preparation but creating extra demand for it in hand-weeding operations.

Actual family labor inputs are also influenced by their opportunity costs in alternative income earning activities, at home or away; by the sexual division of labor; by labor withdrawal for education; and by random indisposition. Among these, the opportunity costs seem to be crucial. Thus the extent of a household's dependence on homegrown food cannot really be described.

It is a function of the structure of alternative opportunities open to the individuals within it. If off-farm activity offers a better perceived. Markets are not new to northern Nigeria. The Kano Close-Settled Zone produced grain for the precolonial city of Kano, and the commercial value of lowland was recognized in a special tax.

Farmers might earn incomes as laborers, craftsmen, or traders, especially during the dry season. The precolonial economy of the Manga Grasslands was based in part on the production and sale of potash and salt from saline lake beds. Livestock were also bought and sold. Markets were linked by long-distance trading networks, and both local and travelling traders operated in rural areas. Export crop production groundnuts and cotton in particular added to the demand for land, because households maintained a subsistence priority, though by the s, land-poor producers in Kano had to sacrifice a part of their grain output to participate in the groundnut market.

Since the demise of the groundnut as an export crop in , its place has been taken to a large extent by grain production for urban markets. In lowland irrigation in particular, market development has an important impact. In a study of fadama lowland use in nearly 19, km 2 , Turner found that distance to markets had a strong correlation with the proportion cultivated.

But the next most important variable was settlement density, a proxy for population density. The penetration of markets into the farming sector has received added impetus from inflationary food prices, especially during the last decade. Markets for produce, inputs, working capital, land, and labor, all affect agricultural activity to an increasing extent, even in areas remote from towns. Market growth and population growth were linked in Boserup's statement of the demographic hypothesis.

Land transformation is tied to both. The extent to which it correlates with changing population density apparently independent of market influence is attributable to the continuing priority accorded by peasant smallholders to household subsistence production.

This, it is well known, is related to risk. Risk comes from the unpredictable operation of ecological factors especially rainfall and of the political economic environment. Our study areas are marginal with respect to both. Two farming systems in semiarid Nigeria—high- and low-density cases—that have population growth rates probably lying between 1.

These points have cultivated percentages of over 80 in the high-density case and about 10 in the low. Smallholder investment in land improvement is relatively far advanced in the high-density case and has barely begun in. Soil fertility is being managed on a sustainable basis on the permanent fields of the high-density case, whereas in the low-density case, long fallows are relied on.

The farm tree component of the high-density system—well integrated with crops and livestock—is also being managed sustainably, whereas farm trees do not play a significant part in the low-density system, except on lowland sites.

It is concluded that population growth, and high population density, are compatible with sustainable resource management under smallholder conditions. The evidence on soil fertility and farm tree management in the high-density case is derived from small samples, restricted to one farming system, and the conclusions derived from it are provisional.

Nevertheless, they challenge the view, commonly held, that population growth necessarily puts destructive pressure on smallholder farming systems, and especially the rapid rates of growth that have been experienced in the last two decades. Growing population density may take expression, in a farming system in which smallholders aim to produce a large proportion of their subsistence, in either an intensification or a degradation pathway. What Lele and Stone call ''autonomous intensification'' has been proceeding in northern Nigeria for decades, and there is a case for "policy-led intensification" to consolidate the gains, and to minimize the possibilities for degradation.

But the threshold for a transition from a degradational to an intensification pathway the possibility of which was recognized three decades ago by Prothero, is not clearly understood owing to the shortage of empirical studies. Figure 3 which is illustrative suggests that irreversible degradation frequently asserted in the literature about semiarid Africa may be more accurately portrayed as a low-level equilibrium, under which economic yields, however scanty, continue.

The high-density case, based on the evidence presented here, represents either stable intensification no degradation and no yield improvement or improving intensification sustainable improved yields.

Obviously the second is a desirable policy objective. But to induce intensification in the low-density case would be premature because the factor ratios principally labor to land are not yet appropriate for intensification, population growth being much further behind.

Sustainable resource management and stable or even slowly improving economic yields may not assure stable or improving incomes. This consideration has led many observers to question whether the smallholder intensification that was adequate in the past can respond to recently accelerated rates of growth, and if not, whether a farming system will not relapse into a degradational mode see, e. This view rests on the assumption that smallholder households are and must continue to be self-sufficient in food production, an assumption that underlies the concept of human carrying or supporting capacities.

At the national level, such an assumption may be a policy directive. Figure 3 The transition from degradation to intensification in a farming system.

The assumption of self-sufficiency is not appropriate at the level of the farming system, at which the link between the population and the land is not immutable. In particular, the myth of a full-time farming peasantry, exclusively dependent on the produce of the smallholding, should be discarded. Migration and circulation reduce the demand for food and generate income. Food crops may be sold as well as market "cash" crops.

Agricultural incomes may be used to finance education or employment while off-farm earnings may be invested in agriculture or land improvement. There are interesting parallels between the experience in the Kano farming system and in the Machakos District, Kenya, where rapid population growth has accompanied a transition from extensive to intensive farming and very substantial investments in land and water conservation during the last three decades the preliminary output from this study is available in a series of working papers published by the Overseas Development Institute, London.

Wolman and Fournier's recommendation that "incentives need to be created for the farmers to remain on the land and make it produce" can be restated: "incentives should be created for smallholders to invest in the land to make it produce"—for even in the semiarid zone, the technical possibilities for increasing productivity have not been exhausted.

But the risks to equity of unimpeded capitalization in land are considerable. Unless rights of access to land can be guaranteed as was attempted in Kenya by land adjudication , the free operation of the market will have a negative effect. The new large landowners in northern Nigeria are not generally remarkable for their interest in intensification, conservation, or sustainability.

The work reported in this paper was partly done under contract to the Federal Agricultural Co-Ordinating Unit, Ibadan, Nigeria, under the terms of the World Bank's Agricultural Sector loan to Nigeria, and the permission of the head of unit to publish it is gratefully acknowledged.

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