In Southwestern Nigeria, however, farming households’ lack of participation in social groups have overshadowed the effect of improving access to financial resources , which hinges on a complex set of factors.There is still no consensus whether these factors are the farming households’ social-economic characteristics, or forms and strength of social groups, or social capital available to farming households.Hence, further studies on the various forms of social capital and social groups available to farming households as well as the effects of social-economic and social capital variables on participation in social groups becomes imperative.Evidence is mounting in Nigeria that social capital as an endogenous input, has a positive effect on different economic outcomes.Currently few studies have addressed the issue of farm productivity and food security within the context of social capital, despite its potential to mitigating shortfalls in households’ income and food supplies, especially in times of crises.Furthermore, these linkages have not been explored among cocoa-based farming households.This study focused on understanding the effect of social capital on farm productivity and food security among cocoa-based farming households in Southwestern Nigeria.The study determined the factors influencing cocoa-based farming households’ participation and level of participation in social groups.The effects of social capital on farm productivity and food security of cocoa-based farming households were analysed.Many theorists have explained food insecurity within in the context of declining food availability and entitlement to food, political economic influences, food shortage as a disaster, and the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework.The SLF is the most suitable for this study, because it describes food insecurity as an outcome of undesirable livelihoods.The SLF is an investigative theoretical framework that is based on how people use their capitals to improve their livelihood outcomes inclusive of farm productivity and food security.The framework focuses on the five main capitals in livelihood activities, which can be used to build resilience in the face of food insecurity.Livelihood capital, which forms the basis for developing strategies against food insecurity, determines the degree or extent of responsiveness of people to food insecurity.Livelihood capitals include natural, physical, financial, human and social capital.The interaction between the capitals ensures a sustainable livelihood strategy i.e., enhanced farm productivity against food insecurity.For example,flood tray rural people depend directly on natural resources from agriculture for their livelihoods.Thus, any change in crop yield or livestock output affects their livelihood and could result in food insecurity.

While traditional capital does not fully lead to improvement in food security, social capital directly and indirectly ensures food security through improved farm productivity.The rationale behind social capital is that and individual’s family, friends, and associates constitute an important asset, one that can be called upon in a crisis, enjoyed for its own sake, and/or leveraged for material gain.With regards to food security, social capital has the power to mitigate shocks to income and food supplies especially in times of crises.Members of social groups who know and trust each other may be more likely to give each other food or money to buy food.This conceivably largely influences the consumption possibilities of individuals in terms of access to food, especially households with limited financial or food resources.Households with higher levels of social capital are less likely to experience hunger.With regards to farm productivity, social networks may indirectly affect productivity by influencing the adoption of improved farming practices and technologies through free flow of information among its members.Social capital may also directly influence productivity through supply of labour from the social relationships available to the individual.This is important in the increasing phase of rural-urban migration, which has created restrictions in the supply of rural farm labour.Farm productivity is important in ensuring food security among farmers; higher farm productivity translates into larger food supplies and consequently lower food prices for consumers and lower food expenditure for rural farm households.Also, increased farm productivity means increased incomes, and improved ability to ensure food security.This interlink age is the focus of this study to provide a better understanding of how farm productivity leads to increased food security and the role social capital plays in this process.When farmers are faced with limited access to credit, they are motivated to improve their access.This study is built on the premise that a farmer can join and actively participate in social groups or networks to access credit without collateral in order to improve farm productivity and food security.It is assumed that the decision to join a social group or not is determined by household demographic factors, farm attributes and institutional factors, which is measured by individual group members’ decision to borrow.

The next stage is the level of participation in social groups, which is measured by the amount farmers borrowed.This is influenced by an additional set of social capital dimensions.This study was carried out in the Southwestern part of Nigeria, between latitude 60 210 N and 80 370 N, and longitude 20 310 E and 60 000E.The area was selected because the region has the highest cocoa production in the country.It covers a land area of approximately 114, 271 km2 representing about 12 percent of the total land area of the country.It comprises six states which include Ekiti, Oyo, Ogun, Ondo, Lagos and Osun.The region is bounded in the North by Kogi and Kwara States, in the South by Atlantic Ocean, in the West by the Republic of Benin and in the East by Edo and Delta States.The total population is about 27, 581, 992.Yoruba is mostly spoken, although there are different dialects even within the same State.It characterized by two climatic seasons, namely a rainy season from March to October and dry season from November to March.The temperature ranges between 21 C and 34 C while the annual rainfall ranges between 1500 mm to 3000 mm.The favourable climatic and soil condition of the area encouraged about 70 percent of the inhabitants to engage in farming.They grow both permanent and annual crops.The climate is ideal for the cultivation of crops like maize, yam, cassava, millet, rice, plantain, cashew and cocoa.The region accounts for over 155 000 tons of cocoa, which represents 85 percent of Nigerian supplies.A multistage sampling procedure was employed to select respondents for this study.The first stage involved purposive selection of two states from Southwestern Nigeria.The second stage involved purposive selection of three Local Government Areas from each selected State.In Osun State, Atakumosa East, Atakumosa West and Ife North LGAs were selected while Ondo West, Idanre and Ile Oluji/Okeigbo LGAs were selected in Ondo State.The states and LGAs were selected, because of the predominance of cocoa production.Virtually all the local communities within these LGAs are involved in cocoa production.At the third stage, there was proportionate sampling of social groups in each LGA based on their availability.Simultaneous equation model was used to analyse the impacts of social capital on farm productivity and food security of cocoa-based farming households.The relationship between food security and social capital among the farming households is indirect through its relationship with farm productivity.Since the variables in the model influence each other, adopting the simultaneous equation model will help reduce the incidence of multi-collinearity and bias.For the purpose of this study, a key assumption is that social capital is generated through interactions of networks of people.This interaction generates benefits to individuals participating in the social groups.

According to Portes , social capital is an individual asset that could improve well-being of participants in the social groups.Due to this, the assumption is that it takes time and resources for social capital to be assessed.This assumption makes social capital to be an endogenous variable i.e., the characteristics and resources of friends, contacts,ebb and flow tray and groups may affect individual outcomes.Hence, this relationship causes the bi-causality between farm productivity, food security, and social capital, because they run in both directions.In addition, farm productivity and food security are statistically and structurally linked through the jointness of the distribution of the error terms and the non-diagonal covariance matrix.This implies that the random error components correlate with each other.There are a number of approaches to deal with endogeneity as discussed earlier.However, the 3SLS IV approach is efficient as it accounts for all forms of bias, provided a suitable instrument is identified.A suitable instrument must correlate with the endogenous variable, but uncorrelated with the dependent variable and error term under study.Such an instrument produces an unbiased and consistent estimate for the endogenous variable under study.The 3SLS estimation procedure also reduces correlation among the endogenous variables and the equations’ error terms to generate more efficient parameter estimates.The 3SLS estimation procedure involves a combination of SUR and 2SLS estimation procedures.The SUR model addresses the statistical and structural cross-equation error among the equations, while 2SLS addresses bi-causality between farm productivity, food security and social capital.In the operationalization of the model, the 3SLS model requires at least two set of equations and the estimation procedure consists of three stages.In the first stage, instrumented values for all endogenous variables are generated.The initial stage is to test for the exclusion restrictions of the instruments.The descriptive statistics of the surveyed cocoa farming households are presented in Table 2.About 7.3% of the respondents are illiterate, 37.3% completed primary education, 44.6% completed secondary education, and 10.6% had tertiary education.If completion of primary school is taken to be a sound literacy level, 92.7% of the respondents could read or write.It can be deduced that the literacy level of the sampled farmers is relatively high.

Most of the respondents are married.This shows that majority of the respondents have a spouse who could assist in the farming operation, thereby reducing cost of hiring labour.This reiterates that cocoa production is mainly a family business maintained by the household in accordance with Ojo and Jibowo.The result also reveals that more than half of the sample households belong to agricultural-based organisations.This implies that there is a social interaction and exchange of ideas among cocoa-based farming households in the study area.About 87 percent of the respondents are men, which indicates that men are more active and involved in cocoa production activities in the area than women, because of stress involved in cocoa farming.More than half of the respondents listed farming as their primary occupation.Although most respondents are primarily involved in farming, some are involved in other occupations.This might be a strategy to mitigate the impact of crop failure or to improve their standard of living.The majority of the respondents own land that they either purchased or inherited.This could encourage farmers to adopt improved technologies to improve their farm productivity and ensure their household food security.An average cocoa farming household head is 51 years old, which implies a relatively old sample population.Generally older people stay in the villages and younger people move to cities for an education, learning a trade and in search of white-collar jobs.This invariably poses a danger for farm productivity and food security among the aged farming categories.This finding corroborates Otunaiya and Ibidunni and Oluwatayo who found that an average cocoa farmer in the Southwestern Nigeria is old.An average cocoa-based farming household in the study area has about 5 ha of land, which confirms the general belief that cocoa farming operates at smallholding levels.This is in line with the findings of Adeogun who reported that the majority of farmers in five cocoa producing states of Nigeria have farms of between one and five hectares.This indicates that the household supplies the most labour for agriculture, which is in agreement with.The mean non-farm income of the respondents is ₦104956.This implies that farmers in the study area engage in economic activities other than farming.Activities mentioned included commercial motorcycle riding and produce buying among young farmers.Others included petty trading among the women, bricklaying, and rent on assets among the old farmers.The average yearly savings is ₦50983 and the average worth of cocoa farming households’ assets in the study area is ₦99284.The yearly saving and value of households’ assets indicates asset endowment and overall economic well-being.The average interest rate in the study area is 1.17, which implies that social groups provide loans to their members at low interest rates.The average loan processing period in the study area was 20.11 days.Thus, the social groups in the study area provide short term loans.The results further revealed that households in the study area trekked an average distance of 0.70 km from their homestead to social group locations or designated buildings.This implies that the social groups’ location is far from the homestead of the households, which could affect attendance of meetings at the designated social group buildings.