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Abstract
Poverty is the most serious threat to natural resources and the
environment and most of the poor are rural-based who engage
in various agricultural activities. Land is a critical asset for the
rural poor and lacking means to appropriately intensify agriculture
which compels the poor to either overuse or misuse this natural resource
base to meet basic needs. This study presents empirical relationship
between land and poverty using Foster, Greer and
Thorbecke weighted poverty measure. Through the multi-stage
sampling procedure, 150 rural farmers were selected with the aid
of questionnaire. The results of poverty decomposition show that
the prevalence of poverty is more among the nearly landless
farming households. Result of stochastic dominance analysis
indicate that poverty incidence is sensitive to changes in poverty
lines and there is second order stochastic dominance as poverty
depth and severity are robust to the choice of poverty line for this
sub-group. Results further suggest that households with little or no
access to farmland depend on non-farm income sources for family
survival.