Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems (Jun 2022)
Sustainable Food Systems and Farmers' Welfare Status Distribution in Oyo State, Nigeria: Building Buffers Against Shocks and Stressors Through Resilience Pillars
Abstract
This study investigated the effect of resilience components and indicators on households' welfare distribution in the study area, using the data collected from households' surveys. Respondents were drawn from the study area through the multistage random sampling technique; while the data obtained from 363 sampled respondents were analyzed and described through the use of descriptive statistics (frequency distribution, percentages, and cross tabulation technique). The resilience tool of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UN-FAO) was adopted to measure the resilience pillars through their corresponding components/indicators. Similarly, a quantile regression econometric model was used to estimate the effect of the resilience pillars vis-à-vis the indicators on welfare distribution in the study area. The results indicated that the majority of the respondents fall within the low quintiles of households' welfare, while women were found to be disproportionately vulnerable to shocks, as many of them fall within the low welfare class. The resilience pillars/components were found to have varying degrees of significance and direction of movement with quintiles of households' welfare status. This was observed across all the quintiles (0.1, 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, and 0.90; that is, 10, 25, 50, 75, and 90th quintiles), respectively. The study recommended proper and transparent implementation of functional social protection programs to reduce households' vulnerability to shock and stressors. There is also the need for investments to be made across all pillars and indicators of resilience to build sustained households' resilience capacity and welfare status.
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