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Research Paper | Management | Nigeria | Volume 5 Issue 5, May 2016

Socioeconomic Perspectives to Arable Crop Farmer-Herder Conflicts in Ebonyi North Zone, Ebonyi State, Nigeria

Umeh G.N ^[2] | Chukwu V.A ^[2]

Abstract: Socioeconomic Perspectives to Arable Crop Farmer-Herder conflicts in Ebonyi North Zone of Ebonyi State, Nigeria was studied. A combination of purposive, systematic and simple random sampling techniques was employed in the selection of 172 respondents (160 farmers and 12 herdsmen). Primary data were sourced through field survey, with the aid of a well-structured questionnaire and interview schedule. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were employed in data analysis. Result showed that majority (96.3 percent) of the farmers were males and belong to age bracket of 51-60 years (29.4percent) and were mostly married (83.8 %). Further analysis showed that all the herdsmen were males with no formal education. The age of majority (31.3 percent) ranged between 31-40 years while 87.50 percent were married. The result of probit analyses showed Chi-square values of 5346.00 and 1283.124 for farmers and herders respectively. This shows the goodness of fit of the models. The overall model was statistically significant (P<0.05), implying that the independent variables asserted great influence on the frequency of conflicts with the herdsmen. Most of the independent variables were statistically significant and met a priori expectations. Two null hypotheses tested were rejected, implying that the socio-economic characteristics of the farmers and herdsmen significantly influenced their frequency of conflicts. The level of human casualty among the two conflicting groups within the period was low. However, the economic loss was huge on the two parties. While the farmers lost a lot of crops and farms to the conflicts the herdsmen lost several cattle and sheep as a result of the conflicts. Crops mostly affected were cassava (89 %) and rice (55 %). Herders seemed to have incurred more economic lost in monetary terms than the farmers. Social cost of the conflict among the farmers and the herdsmen include loss of peace and co-existence among the groups, breakdown of established friendship between the groups, perpetual fear of attack and loss of family means of livelihood. It was recommended that peace and conflict resolution committee that include representatives of farmer and herder communities be instituted by the state government.

Keywords: Conflicts, Fulani Herdsmen, Arable Crops Farmers, Socio-economic Perspective, Ebonyi State, Nigeria

Edition: Volume 5 Issue 5, May 2016,

Pages: 135 - 142

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