Payment for environmental services, rural poverty reduction and agricultural land conservation in Oyo state farm settlements, Nigeria

Despite successive anti-poverty and environmental resources conservation programs by the Nigerian government, the problems of poverty and environmental resources degradation still persist. This study argues that since the two problems are interrelated, the solutions to them must be undertaken simultaneously and in an integrated manner rather than independently of each other. However, one major obstacle to the solution is property rights (i.e. Secured land ownership rights). Past studies argued that without property rights the poor would not be willing to participate in the environmental resources conservation. Besides, studies have indicated that most of the anti-poverty benefits do not reach the target group. Hence, it is inevitably necessary for this study to first of all identify the ‘real poor’ and the categories of the poor multidimensionally. This was achieved with the aid of Alkire and Foster (2010) and Alkire and Santos (2011) multidimensional poverty assessment methods. The study argues that a credit-based Payment for Environmental Services (PES) has the potential to tackle rural poverty and agricultural land degradation simultaneously, without the poor having absolute ownership rights of the agricultural land. To this end a choice experiment approach was employed to design the multi-attributes of PES. Thus, the perspectives of the poor and their preferences for the options of the PES attributes on rural poverty reduction and agricultural land conservation were identified. Multistage sampling technique was used to choose 317 respondents in Akufo, Ijaye and Ilora farm settlements. The main findings of this study revealed that tenancy security of the land is sufficient to attract the poor to participate in land conservation programs. The study also discovered that PES is a viable mechanism for rural poverty reduction and agricultural land conservation. Thus, there is a need for an institutional arrangement for adequate tenancy security provision as this arrangement will enhance the potentials of PES to mitigate both land degradation and rural poverty concomitantly