**8. Opportunities and constraints**

Vegetables plays pivotal role in the Nigerian economy by providing food, nutritional and economic security to households and higher returns to producers. In addition, vegetable crops have high productivity and short maturity cycle leading to higher returns per unit area and time. Globally, without significant increase in yield of vegetables, the strategy to reduce poverty is impossible. In Nigeria with diverse agro-ecological conditions that favor the cultivation of several types of fruit, vegetables and other classes of crops, diversification into NRV cultivation provides interesting and profitable opportunities. A very promising premise in the production of NRVs is the ease of cultivation, they do not need large area of land for profitable production. Successful cultivation could be achieved without excessive investments as they could be cultivated with little inputs like cash and land. Their production, though more labour intensive can provide twice the amount of employment in one hectare of land used for production compared to staple food crop production. Their value chain is longer with more complex stages than staple crops as a result of available job opportunities [158]. This is beneficial for generating additional employment opportunities in rural areas where labour abounds for attaining widespread and equitable growth.

NRVs are particularly viable enterprise for women, the landless and youths because they can be suitably produced in gardens, in and around homesteads, likewise


#### **Table 8.**

*Constraints to production.*

provide opportunities for profit-oriented enterprises and opportunity to contribute to the local economy [64]. There are good potentials for entrepreneurship development by small-scale on-farm and off-farm processing that provides higher income from value-adding activities and sales of processed spices. The growing demand for highvalue crops world-wide is an opportunity for rural households to diversify towards spices enterprises considering the strong potential for higher returns to land, labor and capital.

There is the need for breeding programmes to develop improved cultivars of existing cultivated NRVs. This will encourage farmers into more cultivation and commercialization with the attendant benefits inherent in cultivation and potential impacts of NRVs. In spite of the diverse opportunities inherent in production of NRVs, farmers still operate under high cost of production such as high transportation costs which reduce their productivity to a very large extent. In Nigeria, other factors that affect high productivity in small scale farming include input availability and use. As opined by [159], a continuous cycle of low productivity, income, input availability and use is prevalent among farmers in Nigeria as yields involve combination of education by extension services, access to appropriate and timely inputs along with ability to access finance to purchase inputs. It also further buttress the findings of [160] who posited that poor road network affect the quality of life of producers, their ability to transfer produce to markets which increases spoilage of harvest stalling enterprise sustainability, productivity and income.

As shown in **Table 8**, there are diverse constraints militating against optimum production of root vegetables. These constraints include challenges occasioned by infrastructural factors like high cost of inputs such as seeds, seedlings and other requirements for a successful production enterprise. This ranks as a prime constraint in the production of root vegetables in Kano state, Nigeria. Other infrastructural constraints are high transportation costs, high labor costs, non- availability of inputs and labor for farming activities as well as pest and diseases. Institutional constraints that challenge optimum production of root vegetables include inadequate technical advice, extension support, knowledge of production of root vegetables and poor market information.

*Nigeria Root Vegetables: Production, Utilization, Breeding, Biotechnology and Constraints DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106861*
