ABSTRACT
HIV/AIDS related problems have continued to be major problems for human welfare. The study was set to evaluate the impact of HIV/AIDS on livelihood of rural farmers of Enugu State which has HIV prevalence of 5.2 with about 51,639 persons infected. The study specifically sought to: describe socio economic characteristic of people living with HIV/AIDS, describe the major HIV/AIDS related problems in the rural areas, describe people living with HIV/AIDS’ access/responses to sources of helps to cope with their health status, determine people living with HIV/AIDS’ access to farm assets such farm size, labour, and estimate determinants of technical efficiency of HIV/AIDS infected households. A total of 54 HIV/AIDS affected households were selected. Data were collected through the use of structured questionnaires. Data analysis involved the use of descriptive statistics, Principal Component Analysis, Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Lest Significant Difference (LSD) as well as Coelli 4.0 maximum likelihood estimation techniques. Results showed that fifty six percent of the respondents were females while forty four were males. The distribution by age shows that majority of the patients were between 16-38 years. Access to free drugs and medication was very limited in the study area. Results show that only 16 percent of respondents always had access to free medication while the majority (63%) did not. Free medication is necessary in view of the high cost of drugs and numerous diseases associated with HIV. Twenty-seven percent of the respondents often received help from NGOs while 55 percent did not often receive such help. Principal component analysis showed that HIV infected households were responding most to family helps and also to nutrition and free medication as well as financial help. The LSD test showed that HIV reduces the mean scores of the selected farm assets namely farm size, family labour, hired labour and income. The Maximum Likelihood Estimates (MLE) estimate showed that variance-ratio parameter γ* was 0.5659. It implied that 56.59 percent of the differences between observed and the maximum frontier output for the farmers was due to the existing differences in efficiency levels among them. The estimated value of gamma was 0.782 for all the farmers. Its t-value was 2.636. The statistical significance of this value at 5 percent level implied that all the farmers were grossly inefficient in agricultural production. It showed that productivity is positively related to Land Area (farm size), Family labour, Hired labour and quantity of fertilizer. It was recommended among others that Champaign against HIV should be directed more to young people who are the most infected in order to increase the number of youths actively involved in farming.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was first reported in the United States of America in 1981 and has since become a major worldwide epidemic (National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases, NIAID, 2004). Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is caused by Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). The virus and the infection itself are known as HIV. The term Aids is used to mean the later states of HIV infection. Therefore the terms HIV infection and AIDS are regarded as the different stages of the same diseases (Cable Network News, CNN, 2005).
It is now accepted that HIV/AIDS is not just a health issue. In the recently developed poverty reduction strategy paper, the Nigerian Government designated HIV/AIDS as a cross cutting issue and the Nigerian national HIV/AIDS strategic framework 2000 – 2004 calls for an expanded, multi-sectional National response to the epidemic.
However, the call for other sectors to develop capacity to respond to HIV/AIDS as an epidemic requiring a multi-sectional responds still lags behind. In many sectors, policy making still proceeds as if HIV/AIDS never happened. The estimates for world population rate are being revised downwards due to millions of past and projected deaths resulting from HIV/AIDS (Qemar, 2003). Despite the growing efforts, organizations involved in agricultural research and development generally have limited understanding of how AIDS effects agricultural system and even more limited knowledge of how agriculture may contribute to the spread of HIV. For example, the shocks of HIV/AIDS is observed for FAO (2003) are being felt all over the world, the situation in Sub-Sahara Africa is the most alarming, as can be seen from Table 1.
In Malawi, poles of attraction include rural weekly markets and trading centres of agricultural produce. Villagers and agricultural sector employees mentioned these places as important sites of social and sexual contact between rural and urban people, and among rural people themselves (Bota, 2001). Market operating times were said in some cases to favour sexual relations more than commercial ones. Garnett and Anderson, (1996) noted that where people move into and out of, or between situations of risk, they can contribute to widening the epidemic and raising infection rates in areas that hitherto had low prevalence rate.
The joint Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS) report (2000) estimated that 70 percent of all HIV/AIDS cases worldwide are in Sub-Sahara Africa, which is the most severely affected region. Also in terms of national level comparison, the 21 countries with the highest HIV prevalence are all in Africa. The total number of people living with HIV rose in 2004 to reach its highest level ever. As at December 2004, the estimated 39.4 million people were living with the virus (UNAIDS, 2004) as indicated in Table 2:
The global AIDS epidemic has killed 3.1 million in the past years. Sub-Sahara Africa remains so for the worst affected region with the death rate put at 2.3 million and 25.4 million people are living with HIV as at the end of 2004 (UNAIDS, 2004). The Joint United Nations programme on AIDS (UNAIDS) noted that women and girls make up to almost 57% of young people of all HIV infection in Sub-Sahara Africa, where a striking 76% of young people (aged 15 – 24 years) living with HIV are female.
Given that this disease is predominantly heterosexually transmitted, it was fairly obvious that it had serious implications for society and economy and in particular for systems of production which are heavily dependent upon human labour. Two pieces of research explored this problem. A small scale simulation study using farm management data was undertaken by FAO (Gillespie, 1989) and a field study funded by DFID in 1989 (Barnetta, 1990). The conclusions of these studies were.....
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