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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