11pgs, Nigeria’s current economic plan targets diversification through leveraging the power of the private sector in order to enable and fast‐track business investments and job creation. This paper reports a study of a model of a poultry outgrower scheme ‐ Akwa Prime, used in catalysing private investments in the poultry sector of Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. The scheme shares the potential of combined strength of the state and that of the private sector in stimulating increased production and integrating of small livestock farmers to the national economy. The study’s specific objectives were to examine the extent of smallholder farmer involvement in contract negotiations including price setting; the role of the key participants, particularly the regulatory function of the state in an out‐grower scheme construct; and the impact of the scheme on socioeconomic improvement of smallholder farmers. This research was conducted with 42 smallholder independent broiler poultry farmers who are registered members of the Akwa Prime outgrower scheme and receiving a range of input support and good production practices aimed at optimization. Findings show a positive impact of the scheme on small independent poultry farmers’ productivity, profitability and survival. Contract negotiations and key participants role were fully documented. Participating farmers were found to have high income and stocking density while the cost of day old chicks and other production inputs provided by the scheme accounted for 99.1% (R2=.991) of the variation in farmers income. This positive change on the bottom line of small independent poultry farmers indicate the prospects for greater deployment of out‐grower model to stimulate agriculture productivity and growth. However, despite some benefits there were major bottlenecks including compromised role of the state, imposed buyback price on farmers and late offtaking of the finished stock. The implication of this finding is that small poultry farmers left alone with their independent business choices may not stimulate much diversification driven by agriculture.
14 pages, The paper analysed the effect of farmer’s exposure on different channels in particular establishment of foreign agricultural investments (FAI) farms that are seen as influential in promoting agricultural technology use among neighbouring farmers. Based on proportionate random sampling strategy in areas with both foreign and domestic commercial farms, the effects of farmer characteristics and different exposure channels for promoting and learning agricultural technologies were fitted and estimated in the general Poisson model. Results show that farmer’s age, mobile phones ownership, household poverty, self learning by doing, learning from neighbours, domestic investors, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), National Agricultural Research and Extension Services (NARES) and farmer’s location significantly influence agricultural technologies use among farmers living near commercial farms. But age and household poverty were inverse related to the intensity of farmer’s agricultural technology use. It implies that old age and poverty negatively affect use of agricultural technologies while exposure to FAI is not effective channel for farmer to use agriculture technologies in areas with commercial farms. It was concluded that presence of FAI farms without formal and informal interactions with neighboring farmers does not influence the use of agricultural technologies among farmers, therefore a mere presence of FAI farms should be considered as private investment and not necessarily as a means for promoting agricultural technology use to neighboring farmers. A selective strategy should be considered to use FAI farms as means of promoting use of agricultural technologies among neighboring smallholder farmers based on crop similarity, location endowments, socio-economic characteristics of farmers, extension services availability and technologies used by FAI farms.
