Impact Assessment of Nerica Rice Production in Southwestern Nigeria

Nigeria has a population of about 150 million people, which increases annually. This makes her rank among the fastest growing population in the world. Rice is the most staple food for Nigerians and most people all over the world. There is a huge competition for rice consumption. In recent years, rice production has been expanding at the rate of 6% per annum in Nigeria. With 70 percent of the production increase been attributed to land expansion and only 30 percent been attributed to increase in productivity. The New Rice for Africa (NERICA) was specifically bred by scientist of West Africa Rice Centre (WARDA)) to address the problem of low productivity of upland rice in Sub-saharan Africa. It was introduced to Nigeria in 2002 and the rice has unique characteristics such as shorter duration, high yields, tolerant to major stress, higher protein and good taste compare to the traditional rice varieties. The study was carried out to evaluate farmers' adoption of NERICA rice production and its impact on productivity of upland rice. Purposive sampling procedure was used to select 120 respondents for the study. The socio-economic characteristics and perceived constraints to increase productivity were ascertained using descriptive statistics to analyse the data. The effect of attitude on productivity was also derived in the course of the study. The result showed that NERICA has a high yield compared to other form of varieties with a significant value of 1% and t-value of 2.065. The Pearson product moment correlation analysis shows that the coefficient between productivity (income) and attitude of respondents towards NERICA is 0.661 at a significant value of 0.000 (1%).