Urban Expansion: A Threat to Agricultural Land and Food Security in Ekiti State, Nigeria

This study aims at evaluating the role of Geo-spatial techniques in addressing the issue of urban expansion and growth as a threat to agricultural land uses and food security in Ekiti State. The challenges of reduction in agricultural lands due to population increase and physical development of our urban centres ( provision of infrastructure) has put adverse effect/ threat to food security in Ekiti State especially in urban areas of the state. The uncontrolled rural-urban migration due to socio-economic development has made it imperative to address the problem of reduction in agricultural lands in the study area. Also, the issue of rapid urban development without appropriate attention given to the importance of food security with persistent deteriorating infrastructure for urban food processing has led to rapid price changes, in food and other agricultural products. This study, therefore, attempts to use remote sensing integrated into Geographic Information System technologies to provide powerful tools for mapping and detecting changes in land use and land cover using Ekiti State as a case study. The digital image processing techniques of remote sensing (RS) was employed to enable speedy, accurate and objective interpretation of the multispectral data used for the study, in order to understand the extent , rate and the magnitude of land use and land cover dynamics in the study area. The study reveals that agricultural land and natural vegetation have the highest change .Much of these land areas were converted to built-up areas for the three study epochs (2003, 2013 and 2023). The study concludes that there is a progressive encroachment of built- up areas on agricultural land in the study area, thereby resulting in significant environmental changes that threatens food security.