COMPLIANCE OF AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES WITH ORGANIC AGRICULTURE STANDARD AMONG NIGERIAN FARMERS

Abstract

Organic agriculture, as a practice that promotes sustainable farming is gaining global acceptance. Organic agricultural production presupposes that certain standards need to be followed. Oftentimes, these standards are not strictly followed by many farmers who claimed to practice organic agriculture in Nigeria. The extent to which their agricultural practices comply with the Organic Agriculture Standards in Nigeria (OASN) is yet to be ascertained. Therefore, the compliance of agricultural practices with organic agriculture standard among Nigerian farmers was investigated.

A five-stage sampling procedure was used. Three zones: North-central, South-east and South-west were randomly selected and Benue and Niger, Anambra and Ebonyi, and Ekiti and Oyo states were randomly selected, respectively from the zones. From each state, 10% of Local Government Areas (LGAs) were randomly selected to give a total of 15 LGAs for the study. Thirty rural communities were randomly selected from the LGAs, while 20% of farmers were proportionately selected from the communities to give 310 respondents. Interview schedule was used to collect data on respondents’ socio-economic characteristics including access to extension service, agricultural practices in use (endogenous and exogenous), perception of sustainable agricultural practices, constraints to use of agricultural practices (endogenous and exogenous) and level of compliance with organic standards. Indices of perception (unfavourable, 67.0-117.6; favourable, 117.7-199.0), level of compliance with organic standards (crop: low, 18.0-39.5; high, 39.6- 61.0; livestock: low 12.0-27.6; high, 27.7-46.0) were generated. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Pearson product moment correlation and ANOVA at α0.05.

Respondents’ age, year of formal education, farm size, farming experience and monthly income were 47.7±11.3 years, 10.5±6.1 years, 5.8±1.3ha, 26.5±4.3 years and N 30,098.7±34,509, respectively. Majority of respondents were male (69.0%) and 52.0% had access to extension service fortnightly. For crop production, endogenous practices in use were wood ash (1.00±0.10), multiple cropping (0.99±0.20), neem extract (0.82±0.10), while exogenous practices in use included paraquat (0.80±0.33), pluazifop-P butyl (0.62±0.06) and glyphosate (0.61±0.30). For livestock production, use of ground pawpaw seeds (0.66±0.30), soaked Christmas melon (0.50±0.40), soaked pawpaw leaves (0.40±0.10) were observed as endogenous practices, while ampicillin (0.98±0.10) procaine penicillin (0.67±0.10) and oxytetracyline (0.66±0.20) were exogenous practices in use. Perception of sustainable agricultural practices was favourable among 97.7% of crop farmers; however, 53.4% of livestock farmers were not favourably disposed to sustainable agricultural practices. Farmers were constrained to observe endogenous practices by labour intensiveness (1.54±0.20) and promotion of agrochemicals (1.51±0.10), while exogenous practices were hampered by limited access to capital (1.80±0.80) and high cost of chemical inputs (1.67±0.90). Level of compliance with organic standards was low among 54.1% and 55.6% of crop farmers and livestock farmers, respectively. Years of formal education (r=0.19), access to extension service (r=-0.35), perception of sustainable agricultural practices (r=0.48) were significantly related to compliance with OASN. Compliance with OASN was significantly higher in the South West (36.8±10.4) compared to North Central (34.5±10.7) and South East (32.1±7.6).

Compliance with organic agriculture standard in Nigeria was low for both crop and livestock farmers in Nigeria. Farmers in the South West were more compliant with organic agriculture standards in Nigeria among the zones. Keywords: Organic agriculture standards, Sustainable farming, Exogenous farm practices Word count: 499