Abstract
Efforts to boost food production in the Niger Delta Region (NDR) have been hampered by the occurrence of oil spillage. This has led to low agricultural yield with negative implications on the profitability of cassava productivity. Studies on the impact of oil spillage on the efficiency and profitability of cassava amongst farming households in the NDR are limited. This situation therefore, necessitated this investigation into the influence oil spillage on the profitability of cassava farming in the NDR. A four-stage sampling procedure was applied. Three states: Delta, Rivers and Bayelsa were purposively selected from the four major oil-producing states in NDR. Nine Local Government Areas (LGAs): 4, 3, 2 respectively were purposively selected from Delta, Rivers and Bayelsa based on the prevalence of oil spillage. A total of 45 communities were chosen in the LGAs comprising 20, 15 and 10 communities with proportional allocation to size from Delta, Rivers, and Bayelsa States, respectively. A total of 450 cassava farming households comprising 338 farmers in the non-oil spill (NOS) and 112 farmers in oil spill (OS) locations were sampled. Data were collected with the aid of structured questionnaires and were analysed using descriptive statistics, gross margin and propensity score matching at α0.05. The study revealed that household heads in oil-polluted farms were relatively older in terms of age than their counterparts in non-polluted farms. The Nearest Neighbour Matching and Kernel Based Matching (NNM and KBM) showed that farming on oil spillage-affected land exerted negative and significant effect on the profitability or gross margin through a reduction of profit of between ₦117,645.20 and ₦136,572.39. The implication of this result is that productivity in terms of profit per hectare in non-oil polluted farms was about 50 percent better than farmlands that suffered oil pollution. Thus, the incidence of oil spillage reduced profitability in cassava production in the NDR of Nigeria.