COMACO strategy

COMACO operates largely around a community shareholder-owned company, the Conservation Farmer and Wildlife Producer Trading Centre (CTC), which is able to mobilize large-scale involvement of economically marginalized, food insecure families into viable trade guilds who help reinforce natural resource management. The company draws its board members from different levels of society and professions, including the producers themselves, to help fulfil the CTC's mandate to build a better life for rural people around trade and conservation. Board members and other collaborating partners cooperate to develop commercially successful products from commodities produced by participating communities. The CTC funnels profits into community shareholders for investment in COMACO livelihood objectives and offers competitively higher prices for COMCO-supported commodities, provided producers adopt improved farming and land use practices that lead to more sustainable solutions for income, food security, and conservation.

The CTC works through a network of trading depots located in rural areas. These depots serve as trading hubs where producer group members market and receive direct payment for their produce, as well as price bonuses for conservation compliance. They also serve as community centres for providing training in appropriate livelihood skills and coordinating relevant information about market opportunities guided by improved land use practices and production technologies. This process reinforces the community pledge to honour their land use plan, a requirement under the COMACO model, in return for improved markets and trading services.

Verification of predictions in support of COMACO hypotheses

The COMACO strategy focuses on the role of markets in promoting joint objectives of natural resource management and improved rural livelihoods. For countries with emerging economies and a dependence on its own natural resource base to sustain long-term economic development, COMACO has special importance as an appropriate model for integrating markets, conservation and rural development and as a national strategy for protecting and managing natural resources in Zambia. To validate the COMACO model for broader application in Zambia, monitoring and evaluation results will examine a number of key predictions generated from these hypotheses. A sample includes the following:

• Low-income households will adopt and remain committed to new livelihood skills that promote food security and income diversification in response to COMACO trade incentives.

• Trade activities centred at community depots will sustain increased flow of community-wide information and skills sharing for improved production of commodities marketed by COMACO and improved adoption of conservation-friendly land use practices.

• COMACO trade benefits linked to improved farming practices will maintain a majority household compliance to conservation farming, composting, crop rotation and adoption of desired crops with zero dependence on pesticides among registered COMACO farmers.

• Incidence of illegal or destructive use of natural resources (snaring, poaching, waterhole poisoning, bushfires, over-fishing, unregulated charcoal making, etc.) will decrease as income and food security levels rise among COMACO beneficiaries.

• Families benefiting from COMACO will increase their capacity to remain a nuclear family (e.g. spouses remain together, children complete schooling, etc.) with increased means to sustain basic social needs as education and health care.

• Required expenditures to regulate resource use and enforce natural resource protection laws will decline as COMACO markets increase and leverage improved rural livelihood benefits.

• Community Resources Boards, whose primary revenue source is a share of safari hunting licenses, will invest a portion of this revenue in COMACO-related activities (e.g. skills training, farmer inputs, etc.) to promote increased wildlife production and revenues.

• Luangwa Valley's tourism sector will seek and support COMACO markets as the decline in land use conflicts and their potential threats to tourism become documented and attributed to COMACO.

• Species of wildlife most affected by snaring and illegal hunting (and most vulnerable to local extinction, e.g. wild dog, roan, wildebeest, etc.) will show increased levels of population production in areas where COMACO operates.

• The cost and associated risks of introducing wildlife species in areas where these species have become locally extinct are less in COMACO operates than non-COMACO areas. BACK TO TOP