Abstract

The study empirically examined the micro-level determinants of woodland conversion to arable lands in the Sub-Saharan Region of Africa, taking Eastern Nigeria as an example. This is informed by the increasing effect of land-use change in recent time. The study was based on a sample size of 291 farmers from Enugu State, Nigeria. Three sets of micro-level factors (farmers’ agent action/practices; farmers’ decision factors/characteristics; and institutional parameters) were examined. Specifically, land access, credit access, market access, technology access, tenure regime, leadership status, and membership of farmer groups, were the institutional parameters examined. Farmers’ background, preferences and resources such as land per capita, woodland dependency for livelihood, off-farm employment, fallow period, farming experience, educational background, farm holding/size, economic orientation and age were the farmers’ decision parameters examined. Using the Kaiser or Eigen value criterion, the analysis produced seven principal components (PCs) and non-zero loadings on each PC. The result indicated that the highest subsumed indicants with their respective factor loadings are conservation technology (67%), education (84%), woodland/forest dependency for income (37%), membership of rural group (31%), dependency on fuelwood for domestic energy (38%), economic orientation of the people (24%) and credit access (31%) for PC1, PC2, PC3, PC4, PC5, PC6 and PC7 respectively. This implies that, 84% of the illiteracy (education) is associated with the variances of the hypothesised set of common factors for PC2. The findings indicated that policies that could improve economic status of the rural communities will positively affect adoption of improved technology, and access to yield enhancing technologies that will certainly reduce interference on forest or woodland.

Key words: Factor-factor analysis, woodland conversion determinants, forest conversion, land-use change, arable cropping, principal component extraction, farmers’ characteristics, institutional parameter.