Impact of Fadama III Project on the Food Security Status of Beneficiary and Non Beneficiary Farmers in Kabba/Bunu LGA,

The study examined the impact of Fadama III project on the food security status of beneficiary and non beneficiary farmers in Kabba/Bunu LGA of Kogi state, Nigeria. A two stage sampling technique was used to select 5 villages out of the 15 villages in the area and 18 beneficiary and non beneficiary farmers from each village giving a total o 180 respondents. Generated data were subjected to descriptive statistical analysis, logistic regressions, food security index (FSI), food insecurity gap (FIG), headcount ratio (HCR) and surplus index (SI). Analysis of the socioeconomic variables revealed that most of the beneficiary farmers are within the age of 40 – 49 years while most of the non beneficiary farmers are within the age of 30 – 39 years. About 15 % of the beneficiary farmers had no formal education while 46 % of the non beneficiary farmers had no formal education. The crop output level of the farmers showed that beneficiary farmers had more output than the non beneficiary farmers with an output difference of 1 % before fadama programme and a crop output difference was 9.5 % after the project. Similarly, the farmers had 0.16 % difference in their level of consumption before the fadama project and 13.9 % difference in their consumption level after the project in favour of beneficiary farmers. The result further show that 75(83%) of the beneficiary farmers are food secure as against about 39(34%) of the non beneficiary farmers. The mean FSI of food secure beneficiary farmers was 3.88 while that of food secure non beneficiary farmers had 1.98. The FIG/S