Land tenure and property rights, and household food security among rice farmers in Northern Nigeria

There are growing campaigns to promote land titling to secure Land Tenure and Property Rights (LTPRs) in African agriculture. Theoretically, deed registration should reduce land disputes, facilitate land use as collateral for loans, and stimulate investment in land improvement for increased productivity, income and food security. Empirical evidence in these regards, however, remains anecdotal, and sometimes conflicting. This paper reports a study that examined LTPRs' among smallholder rice farmers in Northern Nigeria and the influence on household food security (HFS). It used cross-section data obtained from 549 rice farmers, selected by multistage sampling across 84 rice-growing communities, seven (7) States and the three (3) geopolitical zones in northern Nigeria. Data collection was by personal interviews of adult members of the farmers' households, focusing on the households' socio-economics, livelihoods, and LTPRs on farmland cultivated during the 2016/17 farming season. HFS was assessed within the framework of the United States Department of Agriculture’ HFS Survey Module. LTPRs assessment was in terms of the type (source) and registration of titles to farmlands. HFS modelling was within the framework of Poisson, Instrumental Variable Poisson (IVP) and Zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) regression methods, with endogeneity concerns and choice of specification addressed within Hausman specification tests. The results show that land titling is not endogenous in the estimated models; and that HFS is significantly (p < 0.01) enhanced with an increase in shares of freehold and leasehold in the households’ farmlands, as against reliance on communal holdings. Holding de jure secure title to farmlands, however, had no significant influence on HFS. The evidence supports the need to develop land markets to enhance the ease of land transfer, as part of measures to enhance HFS in northern Nigeria.