Food Security and Productivity of Urban Food Crop Farming Households in Southern Nigeria

The study investigated the effect of urban food crop farming household’s productivity on household food security in Cross River State, Southern Nigeria. A two-stage sampling technique was used to obtain a sample size of 217 urban food crop farmers. The data was analyzed using food security index, food insecurity/surplus gap index, head count index, productivity index and logistic regression. The result showed that 53.5 % of the households were food insecure while 46.5 % were food secure. The average daily per capita calorie intake for food secure households was 8732.29 kcal, which is higher than the national average; and 880.26 kcal for food insecure households, which is far lower than the national average and the recommended minimum requirement by FAO. The food insecurity gap/surplus index result showed that food secure households exceeded the calorie requirement by 218% while the food insecure households fell short of the calorie requirement by 89%. The logistic regression estimates revealed that the productivity of urban farming households had a significant and positive effect on household’s food security status. This means that the higher the productivity of urban farming household’s, the higher is the probability that households would be food secure. The study therefore recommends that, to reduce food insecurity in the study area government must mak