Destructive Practices

WHAT WOULD YOU DO TO FEED YOUR FAMILY?

What would you do to survive? It was a bad season for crops. Your food harvest was too little to carry your family through to the next harvest. The time and land you devoted to growing cotton kept you from growing more food and the money you earned from the cotton company is still not enough to meet your needs. You were desperate then and you're desperate now. You have a family of 6, you have no money and no food. How are you going to feed your family? Today you don't have any other crops to sell, so you have to find another way to survive...

You take actions into your own hands and do what your ancestors have always done - go out and kill an elephant or a buffalo so your family can survive. Conservationists around the world now hate you. They call you a greedy, selfish, inhumane poacher, but they don't know the whole story.

From happy family to slaughtered carcass at the hands of local poachers.

 In the early 1970's Zambia's Luangwa Valley had an elephant population that exceeded 50,000, yet by the early 1990s only about 10,000 elephants remained. Poachers killed more than 12,000 elephants over a 20 year span since the early 1970's (Kelso, 1993:69).

In 2001, the year that COMACO began its efforts in Luangwa Valley by organizing farmers into groups and teaching new farming skills, only 35% of households surveyed were able to produce enough food by farming to sustain their needs throughout the year. That meant that in many years a large percentage of families, especially in the wildlife rich areas of the Valley, survived by hunting and snaring until the next harvest. The exact number of families getting by in this way is hard to determine, but conservatively, the number was likely in the range of 4000-8000 FAMILIES. That's about 16,000 children, folks!  The average income in these families was around the equivalent of $80 U.S. dollars. For some families lucky enough to own a firearm and to have the hunting skills passed on by the previous generation, farming was no longer the basis for their livelihoods. By comparison, families dependent on poaching had annual incomes 2-3 times higher than non-hunting families and could use meat to exchange for labor to grow food, often producing more food than many farmers who livelihood depended entirely on farming. With numbers like that, what would YOU DO?

Numbers of wild animals that became targets of guns and snares quickly multiplied. In 2001, for example, the average food-insecure family in the Luangwa Valley set snares 3 to 4 times a year, typically using 10-15 snares per setting, and on average would kill 7 animals annually. With a possible 5000 families utilizing snares in a single area, the animal lost would number in the thousands per year.  In this same survey, hunters using guns were able not only to slaughter more animals but were also able to hunt larger, more lucrative prey. Illegal hunters using guns averaged killing 6 animals annually and of the 100+ hunters interviewed, at least 12% had hunted elephants. A region as large as the Luangwa Valley is estimated to have had at least 1000 armed poachers operating in the ecosystem. If only 12% slaughtered only 1 elephant per year, the elephant loss per year would be in .

Flying over Zambia in the dry season looks like a nation on fire. Every direction that you look, smoke fills the sky. Many of these fires are started by people busy cutting trees to make charcoal or clearing new land for farm land. A common way poor farmers earn extra income is through the production of charcoal for cheap, portable energy sold mostly to urban dwellers. In Zambia, large tracts of forests are converted to charcoal by piling cut logs into kilns. Once removed and bagged, the charcoal is transported to urban markets via bicycles, cars and trucks, and sold out in the open in marketplaces all over Zambia. There's lots of money to be made, mostly by urban middlemen, who pay the rural charcoal maker a fraction of what is earned upon resale. Charcoal production is increasing at alarming rates in Zambia and is contributing to large-scale land degradation, habitat loss, watershed damage, down-river flooding and huge carbon output.

Thankfully, there's more to the story! Charcoalers are eager for an alternative source of income and most recognize the practice is destructive and harms their future. COMACO treats charcoal making like poaching and targets families dependent on this livelihood strategy with alternative, better ways to make a living, but the deal is, they have to abandon charcoal making. Click here to read more about the newest COMACO effort in beekeeping and honey production, that's delivering sweet rewards in leaps and bounds!

As COMACO pursued its efforts to transfrom poachers into alternative livelihoods, the some hunters accounted for a much higher proportion of the poaching threat in Luangwa Valley. Thompson Tembo was one of these poachers and was among the first to sign up to change his ways with COMACO’s help.  After three prison sentences for poaching elephants and other species, the promise of new skills, inputs and markets sounded the right way to go and he surrendered his gun.  Over 650 poachers have followed Thompson’s example and more than 1800 firearms are out of action, never again to be pointed and fired at Luangwa Valley’s wildlife.  Today, Thompson makes more money from his 43 bee hives and COMACO-supported cash crops than he was ever able to make as a poacher. Click here to read about the poacher transformation program and how COMACO is succeeding in removing poachers from the Luangwa Valley and saving thousands of wild animals every year!