Impact of Agricultural Development Programme (ADP) on the Quality of Social Existence of Rural Dwellers in Developing Economies

Abstract

This study examines the impact of the Agricultural Development Programme (ADP) on the farmers in the rural areas of Ondo state, Nigeria, West Africa. It examines the impact of the ADP on the farming operations of its target farmers and the adoption of the ADP's agricultural innovation, the farmer-related factors and the organizational factors that are associated with the impact of the ADP. A structured interview schedule was used to elicit responses from 144 contact farmers and 144 non-contact farmers using random sampling to select the non-contact farmers, and systematic sampling with a random start to select the contact farmers from the 24 cells that had been purposively selected from the zones. Correlation analysis was used to test the hypotheses formulated. The results show that the majority of the farmers (51.39 per cent) fell within the ‘medium’ impact level score on the impact table constructed. About 32 per cent fell within the ‘high’ impact level score, while 16.67 per cent fell within the ‘low’ impact level score. Four indicators of impact were used for this study, namely, farm yield, size of land cultivated, adoption of innovation and articles of convenience. The results revealed that there was a significant difference in mean yields of the farmers before and five years after the inception of the ADP in all the four crops examined. There was also a significant difference between the mean score of hectarage of land cultivated by the farmers before and since the inception of the ADP. Furthermore, there was a significant difference in the mean score of articles of convenience possessed by the farmers before and 10 years after the inception of the ADP. The level of adoption of 10 innovations taught by the ADP to the farmers was ‘medium’. That is, more than 60 per cent of the farmers adopted between four and six innovations. Five farmer-related factors positively and significantly correlated with the impact of the ADP, namely, age of the farmers (r = 0.58612), number of children (r = 0.35114), years of formal education (r = 0.46571), size of family labour (r = 0.2967) and size of hired labour (r = 0.46167). The number of wives of the farmers did not have a significant association with the impact of the ADP. The critical value of r at 0.05 = 0.194.