Challenges

In Zambia's Luangwa Valley, one of Africa's great wildlife ecosystems, the black rhinoceros went extinct in less than a decade during the 1970's and early 1980's. Its elephant population was reduced by almost half in the same period by people who lived around the park and sought income from the illegal hunting of its wild animals. Their motivation came from illegal markets.

More recently, hungry people living in Luangwa Valley discovered that using snares to kill wild animals was a good substitute for farming. By exchanging game meat for grain they failed to grow themselves, rural people managed to get by without having to be good farmers. Thousands of animals were killed annually, often slow and agonizing deaths, strangled and cut by steel wire. Such exotic and charismatic species as the lion, wild dog, kudu and roan were vulnerable to this horrific fate. Snaring became widespread in the Luangwa Valley and conventional efforts to police against it failed. It became a silent killer of wildlife, and its detection by wildlife police officers became almost impossible. With so many people relying on snaring to meet their food security needs, conventional law enforcement was doomed from the beginning.

With a struggling tourism industry unable to provide residents of the Luangwa Valley a reliable source of income to make their lives better, large-scale agricultural out-grower schemes owned by multi-national companies found a ready workforce to grow cotton and tobacco. It was a new form of land use with minimal controls. As a result the use of pesticides accelerated as did the rate of land clearing. Over the past decade, cotton has become king and has reached many parts of the Luangwa Valley's watershed and prime wildlife areas. Illegal settlements have penetrated deeply into the valley's protected national forest network in search of more fertile soils to grow cotton. Prime farm land is exhausted after 4 to 5 years of growing cotton, and today farmers are opening new farm plots on hilly slopes where gully erosion and downriver effects of flooding are increasing. This causes a rapid discharging of rainwater that otherwise would have replenished ground water resevoirs. Not only is Zambia losing a valued resource, water, but also untold volume of topsoil that washes away each year and empties into the Luangwa River and beyond. The thousands of tons of pesticides used to support these crops have had untold effects on insects and soil micro-organismsall so vital for pollination of wild plants and the capacity of soils to restore nutrients. The economic losses to Zambia are not calculated, yet they are very real and potentially threatening to future livelihoods.

Throughout the Luangwa River, which runs through the middle of the Luangwa Valley, poor farmers with low levels of education found a relatively easy way of making money by netting fish. In areas where 2-4 pound tilapia bream could once be found, populations have all but collapsed and fishing pressure has intensified with cheap, smaller mesh nets to harvest the remaining undersized, pre-adult fish. An entire food chain in less than twenty years is now under severe threat of collapsing, having unknown consequences on such species as the fishing eagle, fishing owl, otter and crocodile - as well as humans.

Development and conservation can do a better job for Africa and for Luangwa Valley. A broken ecosystem can take generations to repair and extinctions may never be replaced. Biodiversity and ecosystem services are foundations for development and help reduce risks of poverty and famine. Lose them and a country pays dearly to compensate, often in the form of disease, crime, illiteracy and lost opportunities.

Zambia is a country at peace, comfortable with democracy and tolerant of different cultures and ideas. It has the kind of enabling environment where solutions to these problems could be found, tested, modeled and perfected, and quite possibly offered to countries beyond its own national boundaries. Luangwa Valley has become Zambia's living laboratory for meeting this challenge and finding a balance between development and conservation, to reconcile the needs of poor, hungry people with the needs of a fragile and an increasingly damaged ecosystem, renown for its great wildlife assets. COMACO is the model that was developed in response to this challenge and is now being tested, replicated, and refined to integrate improved technologies and business practices into a more holistic land management approach.

This section describes the environmental and livelihood challenges COMACO has taken on, broken down by different categories listed in the "Challenges" box at the top left of this page. Each category section provides a link to information that covers environmental threats, their growing impact on the Luangwa Valley ecosystem, and the various livelihood needs that result from these threats but which can intensify environmental threats further. BACK TO TOP