Access to agricultural land was discovered not to be as difficult as imagined for the small-scale farmers. This cannot be said to be true for the big investors that always need government as a broker (between investors and communities) in such agricultural land deals. Many of the agricultural land allocated in the past secured by certificates of occupancy remain undeveloped. This is partly because the investors had difficulty raising investible funds.
For the so-called big investors, they ride on governments’ goodwill to acquire large parcels of land which some of them cannot access the finance to carry out investment on the land. Governments, therefore, has had to revoke some rights of occupancy to pave the way for more serious investors that are ready to hit the ground running.
Digitization of available land in all the states and the land bank committee will, to a large extent, help in the appropriate allocation of land. At a glance, it will be possible to know vacant lands as well as allocated land whenever approached by prospective investors.
This study presented by PIND Foundation was informed by the need to understand the public policies of the three focal states (Delta, Edo, and Ondo) with respect to access to agricultural land and how such policies are being implemented.
Starting with the national policies and efforts at alleviating the problems of access to agricultural land some past and present policies and programmes of the federal government were reviewed. To get a proper handle on these issues, it is important to adopt a value chain approach since it affords the opportunity to comprehensively study the factors influencing such issues. As part of the methodological approach, government officials were interviewed not only to gain an insight into the policies of the government but also to understand the extent of compliance and challenges of implementation of such policies. While many government officials felt free to discuss, they were extremely reluctant to part with concrete data as empirical evidence to support their claims. To achieve representativeness a two-stage purposive sampling approach was adopted wherein the first stage is to divide each state into senatorial districts, after which one community was chosen in each senatorial district in each state. In the chosen communities, focus group discussions were held to discuss the issues of access to agricultural land and gain some understanding of the supply side. At the end of the exercise, there were in total ninety (90) farmers (10 per community) as respondents, forty-five (45) respondents each of the following categories; marketers (5 per community), inputs dealers (5 per community), marketers (5 per community), processors (5 per community), and transporters (5 per community), across the three states.
In conclusion, study has revealed the state of affairs in access to agricultural land in the three states covered. It is particularly revealing that many of the states are not doing enough to assist real farmers in expanding their farming businesses. They are also helpless in assisting some vulnerable groups such as unemployed youths and women in their quest to access agricultural land for productive ventures. In many cases, they are left to sort themselves out. As for the big investors with sufficient resources, the story is different as they can access significant land with the assistance of the State governors. In general, the three states acknowledge the fact that access to land is a big problem and binding constraint in agricultural production. It was discovered that access to farmland is not considered the biggest challenge of small farmers. Working capital as a source of access to production inputs is considered by farmers as the top priority. The idea of the land bank committee and digitization in the states is worthy of emulation. Similarly, the practice in the three states of clearing and preparing farmland ready for occupation is highly desirable. This is so because of the exorbitant costs and land tenure issues that government can assist in overcoming through such interventions.
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