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ABSTRACT
Cassava is a staple tuber crop widely grown in the tropics. Mostly cultivated by small holding farmers. As such, rural farmers who are characterized by low income, low resource utilization, find it difficult to pool their resources together in order to raise their farm income and substantially improve their living conditions.No doubt, agricultural cooperative still remains a viable tool to solving food security crisis in the economy particularly in cassava cultivation. This study examined the effect of cooperative society membership on cassava production in Nsukka Local Government Area of Enugu state. The study specifically described and compared the socio-economic characteristics of the cooperative and non-cooperative cassava farmers, compared the cost and return of cooperative and non-cooperative cassava farmers production.
A multi-stage sampling procedure was used involving a purposive selection of 3 cooperative societies from the study area, followed by simple random selection of 5 communities, then selection of cassava farmers in the study area. Data were collected using structured questionnaire from 30 cooperative farmers and 40 non-cooperative farmers. Data collected were analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The results of the descriptive statistics showed that 55.00% and 53.33% for non-members and members respectively were male while 45.00% and 46.67% for non-members and members respectively were female.The respondents 37.50% for non-members and 46.67% for members were between the age range of 31-40years majority of the cooperative members (= 3.60) said they were faced with constraint of unfavourable government policies while others listed high Interest rate (= 2.87), poor supervision (= 2.87), much filling of forms (= 2.63), market price (= 2.63), late granting of loan (= 2.53) and number of guarantors (= 2.37) as constraints faced. From the data given by respondents it was observed that respondents that belonged to cooperative society had a better return on investment of 6.1, while those that are non-member of a cooperative society reported a return on investment of 5
