Abstract: Africa's predominantly rural population is located in areas where most inhabitants do not have ready access to social amenities, land and capital. Over the past two decades or more, the living standards of this destitute group have deteriorated with the result that increasing poverty has been associated with widespread underem­ ployment and rural exodus (Adepoju, 1979 ; Ghai and Radwan, 1983). Indeed, it has been suggested in the literature that maldistribution and access to land is a cause of rural poverty and rural exodus, thus the land tenure system and land ownership cannot be divorced from the incidence and rate of rural migration and agrarian change (Dasgupta, 1980 ; Connell et al, 1976 ; Eicher and Baker, 1982 ). Among the major components of demographic change, migration exerts both the strongest and fastest impact on the development process : it influences and is in turn shaped by the employment situation and especially the age structure of the population. In general, all socio-economic policies and programmes have both direct and indirect, expected and unanticipated effects on migration. Hence in the African context, the following areas of migration-agricultural interrelationships are pertinent : - the extent - and how - land use adjusts to family labour availability and the need for the increasingly expensive and scarce migrant labour ; the effect of population pressure on migration, patterns of land use, agricultural productivity and rate of adoption of technical innovation in agriculture (Ahmed, 1977) ; socio-economic and production characteristics of different regions and sectors, their relation to the level and distribution of income and the implications for migration and related policy issues ; and very importantly the causes, magnitude, pattern, characte­ristics and role of migration (inmigration, return migration and out-migration) in the rural areas with respect to agricultural development.