Land and Poverty: Some Empirical Findings Using Cross Sectional Data from Niger Delta Region, Nigeria

Abstract

Poverty is the most serious threat to natural resources and the environment and most of the poor are rural-based who engage in various agricultural activities. Land is a critical asset for the rural poor and lacking means to appropriately intensify agriculture which compels the poor to either overuse or misuse this natural resource base to meet basic needs. This study presents empirical relationship between land and poverty using Foster, Greer and Thorbecke weighted poverty measure. Through the multi-stage sampling procedure, 150 rural farmers were selected with the aid of questionnaire. The results of poverty decomposition show that the prevalence of poverty is more among the nearly landless farming households. Result of stochastic dominance analysis indicate that poverty incidence is sensitive to changes in poverty lines and there is second order stochastic dominance as poverty depth and severity are robust to the choice of poverty line for this sub-group. Results further suggest that households with little or no access to farmland depend on non-farm income sources for family survival.