FOOD SECURITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Sustainable economic development remains one of the most powerful instruments for enhancing 
output, reducing poverty and improving the quality of life. However, Nigeria is faced with 
enormous development challenges such as high unemployment rate, inflation, high poverty rate, 
low institutional quality, huge infrastructure gap amongst others. To examine this concern, this 
study investigated the impact of food security on economic development in Nigeria using auto
regressive distributed lag model (ARDL) estimation technique with time series data from 1990 to 
2023. The ARDL results revealed that an increase in food utilization increased economic 
development in the short run, and decreased it in the long run. Additionally, the results showed 
that food availability, food accessibility and food stability decreased economic development in 
the short run. Meanwhile, in the long run, food availability, food accessibility, and food stability 
increased economic development in Nigeria. Furthermore, food inflation and climate change have 
negative impact on economic development in Nigeria both in the long and short run. Arable land 
however has positive impact in the short run and negative impact in the long run. Therefore, it is 
recommended that local food markets be promoted and small and medium sized enterprises 
encouraged to invest in agro-processing by creating an enabling environment and providing 
incentives for them. Also, the issue of insecurity should be tackled so that farmers can access 
farmlands.