Description

This study provides basis for government action towards commercialization of sorghum production in Nigeria in addition to empirical evidence of the effect of trend, price changes and other factors on sorghum production. The data used for this study were obtained from various secondary sources. The analytical techniques used are grafting technique, adaptive expectation and partial adjustment and cointegration. The data covered the period 1961-1997. The major findings show that while yield per hectare of sorghum have consistently increased but the opposite has been the case for hectarage. Sorghum supply, though positively inclined, was relatively inelastic having short-run and long-run elasticity of 7.05E-10 and 0.0235 respectively for the adaptive expectation hypothesis and 0.1255 for partial adjustment hypothesis, indicating that response to price by the farmers have not been as encouraging as is expected, most likely due to market failures and the objective of going into sorghum production which is suspected to be mainly for food needs. The estimated supply equations through adaptive expectation and partial adjustment are recommended for further use.