Causative Factors Affecting Livelihood Status of Cassava Producers in Kwara State of Nigeria

Empirical analysis of poverty determinants is crucial in evolving strategies in ensuring no poverty and zero hunger among the smallholder cassava farmers who championed cassava food security in Nigeria. Thus, the present research determined the poverty status and the causative factors that affect livelihood status of cassava farmers in Kwara State of Nigeria using field survey information of 2018 production season (wet season) elicited via structured questionnaire complemented with interview schedule from 123 active cassava producers sampled through multi-stage sampling design. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed a young farming population with the interest and zeal to invest in cassava production if given adequate support. However, almost half of the sampled population finds it difficult to keep the body and soul together as per capita daily income of N367.82 ($1.19) per household head to carter for farm family needs is below the threshold of $1.90 recommended by World Bank for per person per day. However, the major factors affecting the livelihood status of the cassava farmers were decline in labour productivity owing to old age, too many mouths of non-productivity dependents to contend with at household level, fatigue due to long farm distance which affects labour efficiency and medic expenditure due to ill-health of the farm family member which drain their capital investment. Therefore, the study recommends provision of social interventions which is crucial for risk management and building a resilient livelihood. In addition, there is a need for improvement on the social amenities and the gesture of health insurance scheme should be extended to the farmers so as to boost their moral towards striving to ensure cassava food security in the studied area and the country in general.


Introduction
Sengul and Tuncer [1] defined poverty as a situation which prevents people from achieving an internationally acceptable level of well-being owing to the deprivation that encompasses shortfalls or inadequacies in basic human necessities. This situation, which is alluded to production failure owing to suppression of markets, institutional and distributional failure is characterized by disease, low life expectancy and physical and mental retardation [2,3].
Economic progress in developing countries since 1990s has led to an increase of more than 1.6 billion in the number of people living above the moderate poverty line. They include 750 million rural people who continue to live in rural areas-demonstrating that rural development has been and will continue to be essential to eradicating hunger and poverty [4]. People exiting low-productivity agriculture are moving mostly into low-productivity informal services, usually in urban areas. The report further showed that since 1990s, the rates of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa have changed very little, and the absolute number of poor has increased.
Poverty in Nigeria is pervasive although the country is rich in human and material resources that should translate into better living standards. In recent times, the need to attain the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has necessitated the drive to eradicate extreme poverty in developing countries to become more urgent [5]. The significance of rural poverty is underscored by the fact that as much as 45 to 80% of the national populace in most developing countries in Africa resides in rural areas and largely dependent on agriculture for livelihood sustainability [2,6].
Instead of finding a pathway out of poverty, poor rural Africans who migrate to cities are more likely to join the already large numbers of urban poor. A similar dynamic is seen in South Asia, where the rural poor are more likely to escape poverty by remaining in rural areas than by moving to cities [4].
The viability of the value chain of cassava production which is the aim of government initiative on cassava production promotion and other donor agencies in collaboration with the government (e.g. IFAD) can only be sustained if the producers of the raw material in the value chain have a sustainable livelihood. Most of the studies conducted on cassava in the studied area explore mostly on the value addition and production with little or no effort to look at the viability of the farmers' income to sustain them and keep their business afloat. It is in view of these that this research was conceptualized to provide policymakers with an insight into a framework for decision, which is needed to effectively minimize poverty and its monetary and non-monetary dimensions.
Therefore, Kwara State was chosen as a pilot area given that it is a major cassava producing area in the ecological zone (Northcentral) which has the highest comparative advantage in cassava production in Nigeria.
In addition, empirical proof on the nature of poverty among the smallholder cassava farmers who are the powerhouse of the chain viz. the extent of influence of the source of income on agriculture and inequality in income is necessary for policy choices. Although, the predicted poverty minimization scenarios for smallholder farmers vary greatly depending upon the nature and rate of poverty-related policies as actual evidence suggests that the depth and severity are still at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia [7,8]. Therefore, the present research aimed at determining the poverty status and the causative factors affecting the livelihood status of cassava farmers in Kwara State of Nigeria. The specific objectives were to describe the socio-economic characteristics of the producers in the studied area; to determine the poverty status of the producers in the studied area; and, to determine the causative factors affecting livelihood status of the cassava producers in the studied area.

Research Methodology
Kwara State of Nigeria lies between longitudes 4 0 20' and 4 0 25' East of the Greenwich meridian and latitudes 8 0 30' and 8 0 50' North of the equator. The population of the state is approximately 2.3 million and has a landmass of approximately 36,825 square kilometres with varying physical features like hills, lowland, rivers etc. Its vegetation is derived savannah with two distinct wet and dry seasons, with mean annual precipitation and monthly temperature of 1000-1500mm and 25 0 C-34 0 C, respectively [9]. The major occupation of the inhabitants is agricultural activities complemented by trade, artisanal, Ayurvedic medicine etc. The multi-stage sampling design was used to draw a sample size of 128 cassava farmers and the undated data elicited from the farmers through the administration of structured questionnaire complemented with interview schedule. In generating the sample size, Agricultural zone D was conveniently selected given that cassava crop adapts well in all the agricultural zones in the state and due to the cost and time constraints of the final year undergraduate research student.
In the next stage, two Local Government Areas (LGAs), namely Offa and Oyun were purposively selected due to the preponderance of cassava producers. From each of the selected LGAs, four villages were randomly selected and from each of the selected villages, 16 farmers were randomly selected, thus given a total sample size of 128 farmers. However, only 123 retrieved questionnaires were found valid for analysis. Objectives 1, 2, and 3 were achieved using descriptive statistics; Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) poverty index; and, logarithm regression model (logit), respectively.

OECD Equivalence Scale
The OECD scale which takes into account both household size and composition was used to determine the adult equivalent and it is specified below (Anonymous, 2007): The first adult is given a weight of 1.
The other adults are given a weight of 0.7, to reflect economies of scale.
Children are given a weight of 0.5 to reflect their presumably lower needs.

Construction of the Poverty Line
Poverty line has been defined as the minimum or the cutoff standard of per capita income below which an individual or household is described as poor [10]. According to Federal Office of expenditure was adopted. Therefore, the poverty line was defined as the two-thirds (2/3) of the mean value of per capita income in the study area. The farm households were categorized into the poor and non-poor group using the two-third mean per capita income as the benchmark [11]. Households whose mean per capita income falls below the poverty line are regarded as being poor while those with their income above the benchmark are non-poor.
It is worth to note that when dealing with poverty, income should be used as the parameter for measurement and not consumption

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which is just one out of the two to three components of income as postulated by Keynes theory. The reason is that being food insecure (consumption) does not imply being poor as some people have misery instinct, but being poor implies being food insecure.
However, when dealing with food security, expenditure should be used as the parameter for measurement and not income as income scope exceed consumption. When α = 0 in FGT, the expression reduces to This is called poverty incidence or gap, describing the proportion of the population that falls below the poverty line.
When α =1 in FGT, the expression reduces to This is called the Poverty depth When α =2 in FGT, the expression becomes This is called Poverty Severity Index. This index weighs the poverty of the poorest household more heavily than those just slightly below the poverty line. It adds to the poverty depth an element of unequal distribution of the poorest household's income below the poverty line.

Logistic Regression Model
The logit model assumes: An equivalent form can be stated as: This can be expressed as And re-written as Where; Y it = an unobservable latent variable for household poverty status (Poor =1, Otherwise = 0) X it = Vector of explanatory variables

Socio-Economic Characteristics of Cassava Farmers in the Studied Area
The results showed the labour force of the farming population to be active and economic viable (43.41±9.85), indicating the tendency of adoption and dissemination of cassava innovation in the studied area (Table 1). In addition, it implies that the youth are   Most of the farmers (71.5%) had no access to pecuniary economic advantages due to their inability to take advantage of the social capital pool in the studied area. The failure of most of the farmers to join co-operative associations might be the major reason why the majority (71.5%) had no access to credit as small to medium scale farmers in their individual capacity mostly lacks the collateral for credit advancement [13].
Moreover, lending agencies preferred to advance credit to the co-operative organization as its creditworthiness is more reliable and the cost of credit administration is relatively cheaper. Most almost all the socio-economic characteristics were significant at less than 10% probability level, an indication that the proportional distribution of each of the socio-economic variables was real and not due to chance. However, the Chi 2 for socio-economic variables viz. seed variety, non-farm income and distance to the farm were non-significant, an indication that the variation in the distribution is due to chance.   The significance of the LR Chi 2 at 10% degree of freedom indicated that the logit model is the best fit for the specified equation and the parameter estimates are different from zero.

Causal Factors Affecting Livelihood Status of Cassava Farming Household
In addition, the multicollinearity test result indicates absent of collinear relationship between the exogenous variables as evidenced from the variance inflation factors (VIF) which were less than 10.00 (Table 3). However, co-operative membership variable was excluded from the analysis due to high collinear relation with credit as evidenced by the Pearson correlation matrix (result not reported). The results showed the number of cases that were correctly predicted to be 97.65% of the 123 observations subjected to the analysis. It is worth to note that since the model subjected to analysis is a generalized linear model (GLM), the MacFadden R 2 needs no explanation as it has little or no empirical extent as when compared to its equivalent R 2 when dealing with OLS estimation.
The results showed that poverty status of the cassava farmers in the studied area was influenced by almost all the predictor variables except farmers' education, the variety of stem cuttings used, extension contact, security threat and access to credit as evidenced from the significance of the estimated coefficients at 10% degree of freedom. The positive significance of the age coefficient shows how the decline in labour efficiency as farmers advance in age will affect their income base, thus making them vulnerable to poverty.
Old farmers mostly lack the strength to do the manual work that is common in local cassava production. In addition, aged farmers are more concerned about food security rather than heighten income is by inheritance to be prone to poverty will increase by 0.047 and 0.700% respectively. The negative significance of the non-farm income coefficient means that farmers who diversified their income sources are less likely to be poor given that they are able to insure or insulate themselves against any unforeseen eventualities (risks and uncertainty) which can threaten their continuous sustenance as against those farmers whom due to paucity of capital stick to one source of income.
Therefore, the marginal and elasticity implications of the poverty status of those farmers who earn income from non-farm activities will decrease by 0.209 and 2.908% respectively. The positive significance of the farm distance coefficient implies that farmers whose farms are far apart from their home are likely to be prone to poverty given that much of the useful time to be expended on the farm is wasted in trekking to reach the farm and also labour efficiency is affected due to fatigue, thus affecting income from cassava production due to low output productivity.
In Therefore, if the going concern of the on-farm business is affected, then the livelihood of the farm family who depends on farm income as a source of livelihood sustenance will be in jeopardy. The inverse relationship of access to credit means that farmers who had access to credit were prone to poverty given that the credit advanced was not productive as it was used for a purpose other than investment i.e. capital consumption and not capital investment, thus affecting their income base due to retirement when the credit matures.
The positive sign of security threat challenges implies that those farmers who faced security challenges viz. farmers/herders' clashes and communal conflicts have their income base affected due to low return as a result of low cassava output, thus making them prone to poverty.

Conclusion and Recommendations
Based on the results it can be concluded that the majority of the sampled farming population is dominated by economically viable able-bodied young farmers who had interest in cassava production.
However, more than one-quarter of them were found to be too poor to meet up with their household needs which owe to age, large household composed of weak people, long distance to the farm and sickness related matters affecting the farm family. Therefore, the study recommends the provision of social intervention to improve the livelihood status of aged farmers, advice farmers on the imperativeness of sustainable livelihood, provision of social amenities to improve the livelihood of cassava farmers in the studied area, thereby enhancing the value chain of cassava production in the studied area. Provision of social protection in the studied area will encourage poor households to invest in riskier but more remunerative livelihood activities, thereby reducing liquidity constraints and supporting labour mobility. The social protection programmes should be designed in such a way that it should link the social benefits to direct promotion of rural employment and agricultural production i.e. linking public export schemes, food purchase schemes and school feeding programmes to smallholder cassava farmers as suppliers. Social protection can also help to contain income inequality and promote a more equitable and sustainable pathway of structural transformation and growth. The provision of social protection programmes will go a long way in fostering a healthier, better-educated population and a more skilled workforce capable of responding to changing demand and joining the transition to higher levels of cassava productivity in the studied area and the country in general.