The continuous importation of fish portends a colossal loss of foreign exchange reserved to Nigeria which requires urgent attention to boost fish production. It is against this backdrop that this study analyzed the profitability analysis of catfish production in Edo State, Nigeria. It specifically describe the production characteristics of the catfish farmers, estimate the input and output quantities of catfish, determine the profitability and identify the constraints associated with catfish production in the study area. Multi-stage sampling procedure was employed to select a total of 468 catfish farmers from the study area. Data collection was achieved through the administration of structured questionnaire. Data analysis was done using descriptive statistics, budgetary techniques and 4-Point Likert-type scale. The results revealed that the farmers in the study area used more of personal savings (58.12%), family land (59.40%) and local feed (82.48%). Stocked more at juvenile stage (70.30%) and produced average output of 4859.51kg per production cycle. The results also showed the average total cost incurred and revenue realized were N 543.67 and N 752.56 per kg fish respectively. The catfish production was profitable with average gross margin, net profit and return per naira invested of N224.35, N208.90 and N1.38 per production cycle respectively. The major constraints faced by catfish farmers were high cost of food (3.96), lack of capital (3.65) and lack of inadequate power supply (3.51) are very serious constraints among others. Since the catfish production was profitable, the farmers should be encouraged to combat these constraints and expand their holdings to boost production.

Parametric utility model that predicts preferences of heterogeneous food consumers is flawed with issues of economic rationality. Using axiomatic preference indexes on food data from 459 household selected from a three-stage sampling procedure, the aim of the study was to check whether a finite set of price and demand observations made on household consumers in Delta state is rationalizable by some form of utility maximization that is common across all households. The study found heterogeneity in food consumption behaviour with evidence against rationality in utility maximization for food expenditure choices at Afriat Efficiency Index (AEI) of unity, violating the GARP, SARP, SGARP, HARP and CM outside the optimum AEI of between 0.536 and 0.982 inclusive. In three of the four food choice categories, households had below the Varian AEI threshold of 0.95. Particularly, household expenditure behavior in the State violated the GARP axiom of revealed preference at 0.018, 0.07, 0.104, 0.05, and 0.081 severity of violations for food in general, protein, carbohydrate, fats and oil, and fruits and vegetables sub-food categories respectively with 5-45% of inconsistent household behaviour. At AEI of unity, 14.30%, 4.79%, 11.43% and 45.04% of the households failed the zero tolerance in the carbohydrate, protein, fats and oil, and fruits and vegetables categories respectively. Only about three to six revealed preferences were found necessary to fully rationalise observed food expenditure choices in the State. Thus, not only are households irrational in utility maximization, there is unstable preference in food demand. Therefore, there is, in the aggregate, no exact one continuous, strictly increasing, piecewise strictly concave, skew-symmetric, and/or homothetic preference function that would completely rationalize households food consumption behaviour in Delta state.