SOCIO-ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF INCOME EFFECTS OF FOREST PRODUCTS ACTIVITIES AMONG RURAL HOUSEHOLDS IN ENUGU STATE, NIGERIA

This study examined the economic importance of exploiting forest products in Enugu State. This study shows that majority of the household heads were between the age of 31 and 50 years. From the study it was found that more of the household heads are males. They engage mainly in different combined operations in forestry enterprises like gathering, processing and marketing. However lack of access to modern technology and the forms in which forest products are marketed were major reasons that weaken income generation from the forest products. From regression results, access to credit (Cr), access to forest extension services (Fx) and relative composition of forest output (Or) were statistically significant at 5% level in explaining the observed variability in the dependent variable income (I) based on double logarithmic model. From the study, we recommend that government should encourage the stakeholders that are involved in forest product activities to import the required machinery without any form of restriction. This will lead to value added in their product and attract more income to both households and government.


INTRODUCTION
In Nigeria and Enugu State in particular, rural households depend on forest resources to meet a variety of livelihood objectives.These objectives include food security, social security, income generation and risk management.Forest activities provide household with lots of inputs, such as fuel woods, fodder and food that are used directly by them and these inputs are also sources of income to households.Generally, forest products are categorized into woods and non-woods.Wood products are timbers, charcoal, fuelwood among others, while non-wood products which add to the economy of the rural households in Enugu State are fibre products; food products; animal products; medicinal and cosmetic plant products including extractive products among others.
Historically in many developing countries like Nigeria, people have had relatively unrestricted access to forest.Poor people have thus been able to exploit the forest for food, fuel and marketable products.While forest product gathering, processing and marketing activities are not restricted to the poor, they do depend on these activities to a great extent.These forestbased activities often require low establishment cost and are characterized by easy entry and open market access; although many rural households undertake them as part time activities to provide supplemental income.
In Enugu State, forest and forest products can generate income in the rural area in addition to provision of insurance against drought and crop failure, thereby diversifying crop production as well as spreading harvest across the season but yet economic productivity of this enterprise is still at predominantly subsistence level as reported by lloeje (1981).This study was designed to investigate the economic importance of forest product activities (gathering, processing and marketing) of rural people in Enugu State and their implications for rural poverty alleviation.

METHODOLOGY
The study was carried out in Enugu State of Nigeria, which was created out of the former Anambra State in 1991.The state is located between latitudes 5 o 56 1 and 7 o 06 1 N and longitudes 6 o 53 1 and 7 o 55 1 E (Ezike, 1988) (Ezike, 1988).
The State occupies an area of about 8,022.95km 2 (Ezike, 1988) and has a population of about 2,452, 996 (NPC, 1992).Enugu State with seventeen local government areas is divided into three agricultural zones namely: Awgu, Enugu and Nsukka Zones.
In the sampling procedure a multistage random sampling was employed to ensure a good spread of respondents for the study.The first stage was the selection of two local government areas from each of the three agricultural zones in Enugu State, giving a total of six local government areas for the study.The second stage was selection of two communities at random from each of the selected six local government areas.This gave a total of twelve (12) communities.Third stage was the selection of twelve household heads from each of the twelve communities, making a total number of 144 household-heads.Out of the 144 householdheads interviewed, 24 of them could not give comprehensive answers to the questions in the data collection instrument and therefore they were discarded and only 120 respondents were used for the analysis.

Data Collection and Analysis
Data for this study were collected with the aid of questionnaires administered to household heads.In all, a total of 144 questionnaires were administered in the state, but only 120 questionnaires were used for the analysis.Descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis were used in analyzing the data.

Modelling the determinants of the level of rural households income generation by forest product activities
The general structure of this model is after the pattern of those of Pani (1966), Siamwalla (1990) and Bell (1990).The multiple regression analysis was used to establish the relationship between the variables.The model is implicitly stated as: where; I =Amount of Income provided by forest-based activities (gathering, processing and/or marketing) (in naira).C r = Access to Credit (in naira).O r = Relative composition of forest output (percentage of forest output accounted for by wood products).U = Error term F x = Access to forest extension services (access = 1, otherwise 0).M k = Market access (percentage of total forest product that is sold for cash).Table 2 shows that 64.17% of the sampled respondents were males, while the rest 35.83% were females.The greater number of males does not presuppose out-rightly that males outnumber the females in the study area.Rather, this can be attributed to the fact that males seem to have more access to forest activities like gathering, processing and marketing.This supports the finding of Falconer and Arnold (1991) that generally men have greater access to the cash economy from forest product activities.This can be agreed upon because from the result shown in Table 2       Table 5 shows that 7.14% of the sampled size has access to timber product only, 28.57% have access to fuelwood only.The remaining 64.29% have access to different wood products in combination.The highest combination is timber, charcoal and fuelwood with 39.29%.According to Iloeje, (1981) these wood products especially fuelwood is collected by rural households from nearby forest and carried to nearest towns for sale, and they act as most important source of fuel energy especially in the rural area.There is also special type of hardwood locally called "icheku" (velvet tamarine) that is used by black smith.Source: Field Survey, October 2005.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Table 6 shows that fibre and animal products each has 5.56% as the respondent that has access to such non-wood products Meanwhile only 23.15% of the respondents have access to food products, but 18.52% have acess to non-wood forest products such as fibre, food and animal.The remaining 47.21% respondents were those with access to non-wood forest products other than ones discussed above.Moreover, only 22.22% of the respondents has access to both animal and food products.These non-wood products according to Richardson (1995) also add to the economy of the rural households.Also according to Obaidullahkhan (1995) non-wood forest products provide considerable opportunities for local income generation especially in developing countries like Nigeria.From the results in Table 8, only 7.5% of the respondents market processed forest products; 40% of the respondents market unprocessed forest products, while 35% market both processed and unprocessed forest products, but the remaining 17.5% of the sampled size did not market any of their forest products.The lower percentages of respondents that market only processed products have indicated that higher percentage of respondents do not have access to forest modern technology (Table 3).This affect the income generation from these products because according to FAO (1995), Falconer and Arnold (1991), only processed forest products generally serve urban and occasionally export markets.

Regression results
To ascertain the determinants of amount of income provided by forest based activities (gathering, processing and marketing), a multiple regression analysis was carried out.
The four functional forms -linear, double-log, semi-log and exponential were used.The double logarithmic was chosen since it provided higher number of variables with significance to levels and also based on its record of having best R 2 , Fratios and also the best coefficients when signs and significance are considered.The results of the multiple regression analysis are shown in Tables 9.  (October, 2005).
From the result as shown in the Table 9, the R 2 value of the model is 0.4726 and this means that the independent variables in the model explained only about 47% of the variability in income effect.This may mean that outside the tested variables, some variables, which may be relevant in the regression model, were omitted.Such variables may include physical proximity of the forest to the household residence, size of the household, marital status, dependency ratio of household, etc. Outside the above factors, the remaining variables are those assumed to have no significant effect and can be justified by the nature of the study.Specific deductions are made using the F-ratios.
The coefficients of both access to credit (Cr) and relative composition of forest output (Or) were both positive and significant at 5% in conformity with the apriori expectations.This implies that both variables are significantly related to the level of income provided.
The coefficient of access to forest extension service (Fx) has negative sign and it is significant at 5%.This implies that access to forest extension services leads to decrease in level of income provided.Meanwhile this disagrees with the apriovi expectation that access to forest extension service would lead to an increase in the level of income provided to the household heads from the forest activities.This is because it is expected that with the presence of forest extension services, households heads involved in forestry activities will be better equiped with modern skills which will help them to earn more income from forest activities.However, the situation may be understood when one considers the poor attitude cultivated by some forest extension agents toward assisting rural dwellers due to poor motivation from their employers.
Coefficients of market access (Mk), access to modern forest product harvesting/processing technology (Ta), Age (Ae), educational level (Ed), number of years in forest business (Bz) and relative contribution of forest based employment in total household employment (Er) were insignificant at 5%.They were therefore ignored.Since the variables were not significant at 5% level when their coefficient are compared, it implies that no significant relationship exists between them and income level provided by forest products (i.e. they are minor or no determinants to the amounts of income by forest product activities in the rural areas) when considered separately but the F-test confirms that in combination, these factors affect income of rural households significantly.

CONCLUSION
From the study, it has been observed that there are a great number of forest products, which are gathered, processed and marketed in Enugu State.These products make direct and indirect contributions to household economy, through the generation of income from the sale and exchange of gathered and processed forest products such as fuel wood, honey, mushroom, fruits, nuts, leaves, bush meat, and numerous other non-wood forest products.However, from the discussion it could be noted that the contributions of this sector to both household income and national GDP will not improve without efficient and effective provision of improved modern forest harvesting/processing technology.This will reduce the problems of under and over exploitation of forest products, resources.
T a = Access to modern forest product harvesting/processing technology (access = 1, otherwise 0).A e = Age of household heads (years).E d = Educational attainment of household heads (years of formal schooling).B z = Number of years in forest product business (years) E r = Relative importance of forest-based employment in total household employment (ratio of percentage contribution of household income from forest activities).
. Enugu State is bounded on the East by Ebonyi State, on the North by Benue and Kogi States, on the south by Abia State and on the west by Anambra State

Table 1 . Distribution of respondents according to age.
Nair (1995)ates that 75% of the sampled size is within the age bracket of 31 -50 years while the rest are either equal to or below 30 and above 50 According toNair (1995), the respondents' age is at a stage at which marginal productivity and productive efficiency, physical energy to work, managerial ability and interest are assumed to increase with age.From the above table, the youths appear uninterested in forest product activities.However, the proportion of people engaged in these forest product activities (gathering, processing and marketing) with respect to age should favour income generation.
Source: Field survey, October 2005 more males have access to forest products than females in Enugu state.

Table 2 . Sex distribution of sampled size.
Table3shows that 27.5% of the respondents admitted have access to modern forest technology while 72.5% have no such access.This lack of access to modern technology is one of the constraints to the further development of forest-based enterprises, and this leads to low productivity of the enterprise thereby resulting in the lower income accumulation from the forestry activities.

Table 4
indicates that 10% of the respondents in the study area have access to wood forest products only, whereas, 30% have access to non-wood forest products while the remaining 60% have access to both wood forest products and non-wood forest products.