Agro-Tourism in North-Central Nigeria: Perceptions, Performance, Problems, and Prospects

Abstract

Agrotourism is gaining increasing worldwide recognition as a veritable opportunity for enhancing rural household incomes, economy, and aggregate national development. Developing countries in need of avenues to escape poverty for majority of their people have abundant potentials for agrotourism supply because of their typically dominant agrarian populations. Available records however indicate low performance level in agrotourism in most developing countries, including Nigeria. With the ultimate aim of enhancing agrotourism practice, policy, and development, the focus of this study was to analyze agrotourism in north-central Nigeria vis-à-vis its perceptions, nature, challenges and potentials. Data for the study were collected from 337 respondents made of small, medium, and large scale farmers that were selected using the multi-stage cluster random sampling procedure. Descriptive and correlation statistics were used to analyze data. Results revealed that respondents exhibited generally poor understanding of the practice and potentials of agrotourism, despite having considerable potentials for income-generating agrotourism that included indigenous and exotic practices and objects in animal and plant husbandry. They also generally lacked the entrepreneurial skills needed to exploit the agrotourism potentials of their farms. While most communities where the study was conducted have a number of agriculture-related festivals that could attract foreign and local tourists, little or no income had been generated thereby, mainly due to poor organization. The paper concludes that it is imperative to devise virile agrotourism policy and programmes in order to effectively harness the abundant agrotourism potentials in Nigeria.