ABSTRACT

The study examines economic analysis of vegetable production and its contribution to household poverty alleviation. Multistage sampling technique was employed to collect primary data using structured questionnaire from 240 respondents for telferia 78, waterleaf 87, and garden egg 75 respectively from 12 villages (communities) from 6 local government areas of Akwa Ibom State. Descriptive statistics, Gross Margin, Stochastic Frontier Cobb-Douglas Production Function, Foster, Greer and Thorbecke (FGT) poverty decomposition model, Ordinary Least Squares and propensity score were used to analyse the data. The results show that the enterprise is profitable in the area of study with a net farm income of N122,800.87 for garden egg, N 170,958.39 for telferia and N122,765.68 for waterleaf, with an average of return to Naira invested of N 1.48, N 1.64, and N 1.75 respectively. The technical efficiency of the three vegetables under study were 0.40, 0.78 and 0.79 for garden egg, telferia and waterleaf respectively. In terms of cost the farmers of the three vegetables are allocatively efficient with a mean allocatively efficiency of 0.68, 0.72 and 0.75 for garden egg, telferia and waterleaf respectively. The mean economic efficiency of 0.68, 0.75 and 0.70. Poverty analysis reveals garden egg with the highest gap % of 24.12, waterleaf with 21.71% and telferia 20.17% respectively. These gaps were however alleviated with the farmers having monthly income of more than N 20,000 for most of the farmers 75.34 %, 74.12% and 80% for garden egg, tellferia and waterleaf respectively. The major constraints faced by the farmers are poor market, lack of storage facilities, transportation, poor seed, pest and disease, cost of fertilizer, poor price, poor yield, and access to credit. It is recommended that access to credit, extension contact, and inputs at subsidized price, good roads which will aid transportation storage