Agricultural Household Models and Food Security Decisions in Rural Nigeria: A Microeconomic Analysis

This study applies agricultural household modelling frameworks to analyse food security decision-making among rural households in Nigeria, examining how production, consumption, and market participation decisions jointly determine household food security outcomes. Agricultural household models recognise that farming households simultaneously produce and consume food, and that their decisions about how much to produce, consume, and sell are jointly determined by prices, technology, endowments, and preferences. This study applies a separable and non-separable agricultural household model framework to survey data from 480 rural farming households in Ogun, Benue, Kaduna, and Enugu States. Model parameters are estimated using seemingly unrelated regression and maximum likelihood methods. Food security is measured using caloric availability, dietary diversity, and food insecurity experience scale dimensions. Simulation analysis examines the food security effects of alternative agricultural policy interventions. Findings reveal that food market participation decisions are significantly influenced by transaction costs, which vary systematically with road infrastructure quality and market distance. Households in areas with high transaction costs show non-separable production-consumption linkages, meaning own-production changes have larger food security effects than equivalent income transfers. The study contributes an original agricultural household model calibrated to Nigerian rural conditions and recommends infrastructure investment as the highest-impact food security intervention in transaction-cost-constrained communities.

Keywords: agricultural household models, food security, rural Nigeria, microeconomic analysis, market participation.