Poverty and Poverty Status in Oil Producing Communities of Ondo State, Nigeria.

Abstract

This paper examined poverty and poverty status in the oil producing communities of Nigeria; using oil-producing communities of Ondo state, Nigeria as a case study. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to collect data on economic characteristics of the household. In the first stage, oil-producing communities were identified. Three communities from coastal areas and three communities from freshwater areas were purposively selected. In each of this area, one hundred and eighty households were randomly picked. This gave the same size of 360 households and where 300 households were successfully and used for further analysis. Twenty- seven percent of the households' consumed 100% of their farm/fish output. Some 50.34% often sold less than 50% of their outputs and 22.33% sold above 50%. Revenue from farming/fishing was estimated to be N159, 624.00 and loss of N175, 350.00. Households that made income losses from farming/fishing activities were 22.66% more than the number of those who did not lose. The results revealed that 60.18 percent of the households fell below the poverty line. Poverty gap index revealed 26.8% and 11.1% for severity of poverty. The majority of the identified poor households depended more on income from farming/fishing livelihood activities. The findings thus, revealed that majority of the households that do not diversified to non-farm livelihood activities were in the poor category. The different poverty levels were attributed to the intervention of oil pollution that led to decrease or loss of livelihood activities in farming/fishing, leading to poor incomes earned. Development of non farm rural activities (NFRA), education, improved health care facilities among other things are recommended as a way of alleviating extreme poverty situations in the area of study.