ABSTRACT
This article evaluated food security status of rice farming households in Kano State, Nigeria. Descriptive statistics, food security index and binary logistic regression were employed for data analysis. A sample of 660 respondents was chosen using multi-stage sampling procedure. Descriptive statistics showed that males have higher percentage of engagement than the females with 85% and 15% for males and females respectively. 72.6% of the respondents were food secure households while 27.4% were food insecure households with calculated food security index of 51,439.59. Binary logistic result revealed that age, household education, experience, household size and farm size were the significant determinants of food security in the study area with -0.134, 0.002, 0.121, -1.671 and 0.078 coefficients at 10%, 10%, 5%, 10% and 10% significance level respectively. The challenges encountered by the farmers in addressing food security condition were high fertilizer cost, diseases and pests, unequipped storage facilities, high labor cost, poor access to credit facilities, high cost of insecticides, inadequate visit by extension agent and high cost of rent. The study highlighted that, since resources are limited, farmer-extension agent relationship should be encouraged so that farmers would be opportune to learn more new production technologies and how to utilize limited resources efficiently to get higher output from the production and hence improve food security condition.
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