An Assessment of the Impact of Pesticide use by Urban Cultivators Inoyo State, South-Western Nigeria.

This study is an investigation into pesticide use amongst urban agriculture practitioners in Ibadan, South-Western Nigeria. It explores pesticide use in urban agriculture within the broader context of sustainable development and its dimensions, namely; the environment, economy and society in sustainable agriculture. This study is significant as no single study in Nigeria has looked at how pesticide use in urban agriculture impacts on broader developmental issues using both methods from natural and social sciences. Furthermore, there are conflicting data on the extent of UA in Ibadan City and all previous work carried out has been purely descriptive and no recent work on pesticide presence in the environment. This research adopted an interdisciplinary approach to developing a methodology that combines natural and social perspectives as there exist relationships amongst people, profit and planet. Therefore, this investigation utilised both a positivist and interpretivist paradigm in adopting a mixed methods approach in answering the research questions on historical and current pesticide contamination in environment; and evaluating the extent of pesticide use by UA farmers in Ibadan and explore farmers’ knowledge concerning good practice, farmer awareness of the environmental impacts of poor practice, and farmer motivations with respect to the socio-economic drivers that determine pesticide use. These methods included quantitative natural science methods of soil, sediment, and diatom analysis; and quantitative and qualitative social science methods of questionnaires, interviews and focus group discussions. The results from soil and sediment analysis showed pesticide residues, including banned organochlorine pesticides such as Dieldrin, DDT, Endosulfan, and Endrin. Further investigations to establish long-term contamination using biological and radioactive indicators yielded limited results and therefore, historical contamination of the study area could not be established. However, quantitative analysis of pesticide use conducted via SPSS software showed a high incidence of pesticide use amongst farmers but no significant relationships between its use and farmers’ characteristics such as age, gender, educational level and land tenure status. Despite no significant relationships between pesticide use and socio-economic variables, qualitative analysis of interviews and focus group discussions indicated an awareness of the harmful effects of pesticides by farmers and continued pesticide use is a precautionary strategy. It also suggested farmers willfully ignore impacts of pesticides on the environment and their health with little understanding of the long-term implications for their livelihoods. Though pesticide residues in soil and sediments in this study are in low quantity, this study revealed new insights into farmers’ limited knowledge on long-term impacts of pesticide use on the three dimensions of sustainable development as farmers’ trade good agricultural practice, knowledge and awareness for livelihood and economic considerations. With the country committed to the sustainable development goals, the insights generated in this study emphasise the need for policy redress that can tap into the potentials of urban agriculture, especially in the education of farmers regarding pesticide use as a last alternative in their agricultural production. Also, a resuscitation of the country’s existing law on pesticide monitoring and enforcement should be encouraged.