摘要：Oil pollution has degraded agricultural lands leading to an increase in poverty levels and turning productive areas into waste lands in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. This paper examines the effects of oil spillage as a catalyst in accelerating deforestation and reducing agricultural productivity in the Niger Delta from 1985 to 2013. In doing this, the authors estimated the effects of levels of oil spillage and forest loss, which reduced forest biomass as factors of agricultural production and tested the hypothesis that agricultural land and forestland were degraded more efficiently as a result of oil spillage. The empirical analysis derived a unique estimable production function based on Ramon Lopez’s Cobb Douglas production function model. The new model included an oil extraction variable – oil spillage as an externality; land degradation as a proxy for deforestation and forest biomass as the proportion of cultivated and forest or fallow land affected by oil spills, while secondary data for land and labor were sourced from FAOSTAT and FAO yearbooks and the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) databases respectively. The findings established that increasing levels of oil spills and forest loss negatively affect agricultural productivity, while land, labor and capital positively improved agricultural production in the Niger Delta.
