Economic Policy Strategy to Attaining Rapid Sustainable Economic Development in Nigeria through Diversification into Cattle, Poultry, Piggery and Fishery Sub-Sectors

In my last blog post, I posted an abstract of my research conducted on the topic: Appraisal of the Role of Cattle, Poultry, Piggery and Fishery Sub-Sectors to Sustainable Economic Development in Nigeria: 1982-2014, where I promised on rolling in series of articles from the research study. Here now and without waste of time is an introduction and general overview of the research done.

Nigeria is the largest crude oil exporting country in Africa and the sixth in the world. The country has being pursuing a resource based growth strategy driven mainly by extracting and exporting crude oil. Nigeria has maintained its impressive annual economy growth rate, higher than the West African sub-regional level and far higher than the sub-Saharan Africa level over the past decade with a recorded estimate of 7.4% growth rate of real Gross Domestic Product before the 2015 oil price crash (clear indication that the country’s source of revenue generation is predominantly derived from the oil and gas sector).

With the volatility of global oil prices in the international market as witnessed from June 2015-date have often lead to unstable growth of the Nigerian economy. Despite the Nigeria’s enormous natural and human resources endowments, the country have continuously settled on its huge crude oil resource deposit as the main source of revenue generation and thus, driving a monoculture economy. Regrettably, the oil resources are being mismanaged with a substantial part of it gone on rent seeking and red-tapism common to Nigeria bureaucracy. Lack of control over incessantplunging of oil prices is one of the major problems confronting and hampering sustainable economic growth and development of the largest economy in Africa.

There is every need in light of the above facts to diversify the revenue base of the country as was done in Brazil for example, which hitherto economy structure had centered on agriculture sector and forming the root of its astounding economic advancement to the position today as one of the developed economy of the world.

To successfully actualize the goal of this study, the research study is structured into five (5) chapters. This introductory section is chapter one; the section deals with the background of the study, statement of the problem, objective of the study, research questions, significance of the study, and scope and limitations of the study. Chapter two is literature review, in this blog post series, we shall be reviewing related theoretical and empirical literatures related to the study; introduce the concepts of Sustainable Economic Development, Sustainable Agriculture, Measure of Economic Welfare (MEW) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Economy Diversification and the performance of the agriculture sector in Nigeria all shall be discussed with up to date statistics and economic indicators. Chapter three focused on the role of selected livestock sub-sectors to sustainable economic development in Nigeria.

Due to the unique production systems and challenges facing each of the selected livestock sub-sectors (poultry, fisheries, piggeries and cattle production), shall be taking our time to discussing individual systems of production in each sub-sector, the role of each sub-sector in sustaining economic development in Nigeria and challenges of production and possible solutions to addressing these challenges.

Chapter four deals with the methodology; the data sources and variable definitions, estimation technique, model specifications, empirical results presentation and analysis of empirical results were provided. Chapter five is the last section in this research study; it deals with summary of the study, policy recommendations, area for further research and conclusion.

We shall in our subsequent post be discussing the background of the study in other for us to appreciate the important of the study and the selected livestock sub-sectors in Economic Development Sustainability of Nigeria.

Cite as follows: Dan-Abu Michael Ngbede, (2016). Appraisal of the Role of Cattle, Poultry, Piggery and Fishery Sub-Sectors to Sustainable Economic Development in Nigeria: 1982-2014. A research project submitted to the department of Economics, University of Jos, Plateau state, Nigeria in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the award of Bachelor of Science (B. Sc) in Economics.