This study examined the impact of price and total expenditure on food demand in
Edo, Delta and Lagos states of Nigeria. A multistage sampling technique was used to
collect cross-sectional data from eight hundred and twelve (812) households for the
study. Both descriptive statistics and the Linear Approximate Almost Ideal Demand
System (LA/AIDS) model as inferential statistics were used to estimate the
responsiveness of demand for food to changes in prices, expenditures and incomes.
The study found out that the majority of the household heads were young male, with
small (1-5 members) to medium (6-10 members) family size and lived in urban
centers. Though rice constituted the largest share of the household total food
expenditure, in both rural and urban centres, income did not have much weight in its
consumption, with less substitutability in response to changes in own-price and has
changed from being a luxury to being a necessity. While the low-income and rural
households spent more of their income on food, the share of rice and yam in the
household’s budgets was higher at higher income levels while that of cassava, a less
expensive source of calories, was lower among the high income and relatively
affluent urban households. The budget share of meat and fish, a more expensive
source of calories, being mainly protein sources, was higher among the low-income
and less affluent households in the urban centres. The result of the LA/AIDS showed
that, in terms of own-price elasticity, the compensated own-price elasticity for rice (-
1.0659) was the most elastic, followed by garri (-0.9655), yam (-0.5792), other
cereals (-0.5611), and meat/fish (-0.4440). Rice, garri and yam were the main
Nigerian staples. The demand for these food items in Nigeria is not so much a matter
of price, rather, it is a phenomenon linked with the ease of preparation, household
characteristics and urban lifestyles. To meet with the present demand, Nigeria needs
to increase the production of these food items.