3. Land tenure, food security and livelihood security

Rural Nigeria is agricultural as 85% of the residents depend on agriculture for their livelihood. However, access to land is limited as families and community heads still manage to control land thereby determining access to land. Given the position of Land Use Act 1978, it implies that the beneficiaries of the communal land allocation system are not formally recognised as the legal holders of right to the land. Again, family and community heads rely on memory and reference to natural and artificial features to define plots of land that is prone to uncertainty regarding the location of boundaries [23]. This is because most communal land allocations are not documented [23].

Availability of land determines food and livelihood security given the level of agricultural development in Nigeria [17]. This is because farming operations will remain at subsistence level due to inadequate access to land. In fact, an estimated 95% of agricultural lands in Nigeria are not titled [24]. This undermines the capacity of farmers to present lands as collateral to access formal loans from financial institutions [24]. Again, the lack of absolute or nonderivative property interest constrains the ability of farming households to plant cash crops consequently limiting their income generation potentials [17]. Therefore, food security is difficult as the population continues to grow and agricultural land becomes scarce [25]. The challenges of agricultural production and food security including inadequate access to land, finance and technology, inconsistent policy regime, infrastructure deficit and adverse climate change impacts have been documented in literature [26, 27].
