Land Acquisition and Use in Nigeria: Implications for Sustainable Food and Livelihood Security

Abstract

Land acquisition and use remain a critical issue of great policy relevance in developing countries such as Nigeria. This study therefore examined land acquisition and use in Nigeria within the context of food and livelihood security. The chapter used secondary data obtained from the World Bank website, National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and other sources. It was found that there are gender, location and income-group considerations in the allocation of land in Nigeria. While the urban land market is relatively more formal, the rural land market is informal and the transactions were not documented in most cases. The study found that bureaucratic bottlenecks, high cost of registering land and long registration procedures, and inconsistent policy regimes impede the development of land market in Nigeria. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that the government should reduce and make the processes to be completed in registering lands in Nigeria easier. The Land Use Act 1978 should be amended to capture the prevailing realities around customary laws and informal markets. The government should reduce the cost of land registration in Nigeria. Multilateral organisations and government should co-create and co-finance innovative interventions to improve activities in the land market. are carried out in informal markets under customary laws with poor or lack of documentation, especially in rural Nigeria. The land market in Nigeria has evolved over the years from the precolonial era when land titles were in custody of family and community heads through colonial era and post-colonial era. The current framework undermines food security as farmers typically lack the access to land and as such cannot scale their subsistence farming or even present land as collateral for formal loans. This study identified bureaucratic bottlenecks, high cost of registration of land title, weak land markets and policy inconsistency as the challenges of land acquisition and use in Nigeria. Based on the findings of the study, the following are recommended: