Addressing Hunger and Poverty

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) pioneered the development of COMACO in response to survey work that showed in most any year 40 to 60% of the subsistence-based households living in Luangwa Valley were unable to grow enough food from one harvest to the next. Moreover, annual income for household heads was less than $100. WCS found it unacceptable to ask such people to make sacrifices for wildlife conservation without first addressing the fundamental needs of food and income security for these same people.

Unlike previous efforts to enforce wildlife conservation through conventional law enforcement, COMACO works to secure solutions to hunger and poverty in ways that sustain rural peoples willingness to adopt land use practices compatible with wildlife management. Making this linkage work through environmentally-friendly market incentives is the real essence of what COMACO is all about.

Under COMACO, solutions to hunger and poverty are therefore based on strategies that are environmentally safe but commercially rewarding relative to other land use practices that alternative markets might promote but which are environmentally less safe. Preliminary results suggest the COMACO strategy is working. A 2006 food survey indicated that household adoption of conservation farming techniques among the 30,000 producer group members now in the program are having a positive impact on food security. 84.6% of households practicing conservation farming achieved food security to the 9 month target (when fresh produce becomes available), as opposed to only 70.1% for non-practicing farmers. Moreover, COMACO has demonstrated its capacity as a business model to sustain producer price increases by over 100% for most of the commodities it purchases, all of which are environmentally safe and lead to improved soils and less need to clear forests. Farmers are now realizing real financial gains from complying with the COMACO conservation guidelines. Illegal hunters, for example, have doubled their income from legal sources since joining the program. As incomes increase and food sources diversify, the wildlife population has stabilized and increased slightly since the beginning of the COMACO intervention in 2002.