Rural Development and Sustainable Food Security in Ondo State, Nigeria

Abstract

Rural development has been identified as a veritable tool for sustainable food security in developing nations of the world. However, most rural areas in Nigeria are still battling with lack or shortage of basic amenities, decline in agricultural growth, food insecurity, malnutrition and poor economy. This paper therefore examined rural development and sustainable food security in Ondo state, Nigeria. The population of the study consisted of all the rural dwellers in the rural communities across the three Senatorial Districts in Ondo State.The study adopted a descriptive research design of the survey type. A validated instrument with established reliability index r-value =0.78 was used to elicit information from 300 rural dwellers randomly selected from 15 rural communities across the three Senatorial Districts in the State. Three research objectives were formulated and handled using descriptive statistics of frequency count, simple percentages and mean. The two hypotheses raised in the study were tested using Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation (PPMC) and Chi-square respectively.A significant relationship was observed between age, farm size and household size(r=0.586, r=0.707, r=0.659, P< 0.05) and level of food security. Similarly, the result of the chi-square analysis showed a positive and significant relationship between the community areas of needs (social facilities, economic facilities and physical facilities with ( =7.041, 11.573 and 11.920, p

<0.05 respectively) and level of food security. It was therefore recommended that all the stakeholders concerned with sustainable rural development should harness the potentials inherent in rural transformation as a panacea to sustainable food security in Nigeria.