CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
Food security issues have continually attracted the attention of the world leaders. The discussions of the world food summit of 1996 in Rome (Food and Agricultural Organization, FAO,2014) and that of the trade ministers from around the world in Doha 2001 (Trueblood and Shapouri, 2002) were centered on world food security matters especially in the least developed countries of the world. In 1974, the world leaders declared during the world food conference that ―every man, woman and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition in order to develop their physical and mental faculties‖ (FAO, 2014). As a follow-up to this, the world food summit of 1996 set the target of eradicating hunger in all countries, with an immediate view of reducing the number of undernourished people by half not later than 2015 (FAO, 1999).
Eighteen years after the Rome declaration however and less than a year to the set target, FAO (2014) stated that about 805 million people were estimated to be chronically undernourished in 2012-14 and that one out of every nine people in the world still has insufficient food. It was also noted that most of the undernourished people (791 million) live in developing countries, includingNigeria. Currently, Nigeria is ranked thirty-eighth out of 76 countries on the Global Hunger Index (GHI), having a GHI of 14.7 (International Food Policy Research Institute, IFPRI, 2014). Though this shows a slight improvement over the 2011 figure of GHI 15.5 (IFPRI, 2011), it is still outside an acceptable range for the global food security target (GHI of ≤4.9).However, the GHI report of 2016 that show the countries status for the year 2015 is of great concern as Nigeria has sunk deeper to having a GHI of 25.5 a category described by IFPRI (2016) as serious. This is of concern because the GHI mirrors the food security situation of the nation. It is designed to comprehensively and track hunger globally and by country and region. The GHI is an indicator that is calculated based on four important components/indicators that is linked to correct feeding (food security). The first of these indicators is undernourishment (the proportion of undernourished people in as a percentage of the population). This reflects the share of the population with insufficient caloric intake. The second indicator is child wasting, which is the proportion of children under the age of five that have weights that are too low for their heights. The third indicator, child stunting is based on the proportion of children under the age of five that who suffer from stunting (low height for their ages). The second and the third indicators of GHI are reflection of acute and chronic under nutrition. The final indicator hinges on child mortality of children under the age of five which partially reflects the fatal synergy of inadequate nutrition and unhealthy environments (IFPRI, 2016).
In the report of Ibrahim and Oyewole (2010), major interventions have been initiated by the government of Nigeria aimed at increasing the domestic food production. This was as a result of the output drop in the agricultural and food sector following the shift of attention from agriculture to the oil sector in the early 1970‘s. One of such interventions include irrigation agriculture. Irrigation farming is the provision of the right amount of water at the right time for plant growth and development. Nigeria is characterized by fair to good soil environment but poor and unreliable rainfall, especially in the arid and semi-arid areasof the north-western Nigeria (Oriola,2009). According to Dauda, Asiribo, Akinbode, Saka and Salahu, (2009), irrigation farming has increased in Nigeria in the recent times and to improve agricultural productivity, especially in areas of low rainfall of northern Nigeria, irrigation farming has been adopted as best alternative.