Regulatory Approach to Poultry Production in Nigeria: Chicken Breeds Trading and Development of Database in Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigated the characterization and documentation status of available chicken breeds in Nigeria, likewise, the development of a chicken diversity database for inventory and future uses in Nigeria. Eleven major and some subsidiary chicken promoters/companies were surveyed. Data were obtained through individual interviews with some members of the day-old-chick (DOC) Merchants Association of Nigeria. A total of 400 respondents were randomly selected and interviewed on the chickens’ companies’ products and trading routes among customers. The data collected were subjected to descriptive statistical analysis of simple percentages and proportions. For the chicken database development, a free and open-source software XAMPP in Bitnami and content management framework (CMF) written in PHP and MySQL database were ex-plored. None of the chicken promoters/companies in the country responded posi-tively to the survey. Intra-West African countries trading was facilitated. The developed stand-alone chicken database named chickendb_ng runs on open-source software known as XAMPP (Cross-platform Apache MariaDB PHP and Perl) stack on the MariaDB Server 127.0.0.1 via TCP/IP with Server version of 10.4.1.8-MariaDB. The User, root @localhost with Protocol version of 10 and Server charset cp 1252 West European (Latin 1). The chicken database featured 23 tables in a friendly Graphical Users’ Interphase to collect the data of interest on Nigerian chicken breeds/strains. Implementation of the developed stand-alone chickendn_ng will aid documentation of Nigerian chicken breeds, possible integration with other international databases, and may increase agricultural and food productivity in Nigeria. The chickens’ database system may also lead to their outputs’ growth and thereby strengthen intra-Africa trade.