This study was carried out to determine the extent of technical skills acquired in cocoa production by senior secondary students for promoting food security in Cross River State. The study adopted survey research design. Four purposes of study and four corresponding research questions, as well as two hypotheses guided the study. The instrument used for the study was a structured questionnaire which has four points rating scale of Highly Acquired (HA), Acquired(A) Rarely Acquired(RA) and Not Acquired (NA) with their nominal values of 4,3,2, and 1 respectively. The instrument which contains 27 items was validated by three experts from the university of Calabar. The specialists’ observations and corrections were incorporated at the final stage of the production of the instrument. The reliability of the instrument was determined by using cronbach alpha to analyse the result of the preliminary test, and 0.92 was obtained as the reliability coefficient. The data collected with the instrument were analysed using mean and standard deviation for the research questions while t-test was used to test the hypotheses formulated. The result of the analysis revealed that the senior secondary students of agricultural science in Cross River State acquired technical skills in pre-planting operations, post-planting operations as well as harvesting and post-harvesting operations. On the basis of the findings, the following recommendations among others were that in the teaching of crop production the teachers should lay more emphasis on those skills in cocoa production
Keywords: Food Security, Technical skills, cocoa production
