Markets, Food Security and Conservation: A Model for Rural Development in Zambia

(Dale Lewis, Wildlife Conservation Society)

Perspectives on land management: the role of markets in rural Zambia

An assessment of the way markets operate in rural Zambia suggests that commercial interests generally view rural people as accustomed to living off the land without much need for money, making their exploitation somehow justified. Take the opinion expressed by a large-scale commodities trader in Zambia when asked the best way to buy soybeans from small-scale farmers. His reply was, "I always buy early in the season when farmers are poorest and most willing to sell at the lowest price". From a business perspective, such a strategy makes sense for the urban-based trader but does little to advance annual rural incomes that average below $200 in many parts of the country.

If rural people are regarded as cheap labor for the private sector, they are also the target of protectionist laws designed to prevent these same people from degrading the country's natural resources. Illegal hunting of wildlife, over-fishing with undersized nets and large-scale conversion of trees into charcoal are common examples. In their own self-defense, rural people claim that in the absence of better-paying market alternatives or the needed skills to pursue them, land use practices that degrade natural resources are unavoidable.

Underlying this dilemma is the insidious consequence that over-reliance on certain cash crops, which are intended to provide economic relief, can have on food security, especially when combined with poor farming practices. Many households seeking higher incomes reduce their commitment to farming food crops in preference to cash crops, only to find their farm-based income is too little to meet their domestic food needs throughout the year. To cope with food shortfall, they sometimes rely on exploitation of local natural resources as exchangeable commodities, such as wildlife or fish, on scales that over time can lead to resource depletion and reduced options for income diversification. Longer-term impact these crops may have on soils and watersheds is understandably beyond the concerns of households who face more urgent income and food security needs.

These relationships may be beyond the grasp of semi-illiterate farmers, which in many parts of Zambia account for a sizeable fraction of the farming community. Consider, for instance, when local farmers in a community were asked how much they make in a month growing a particular cash crop. Because none could do the arithmetic and no one had explained how to calculate it, all they knew was the total amount they would earn after 8 months of hard farm labor to grow the crop. Upon learning that they were working for just $12 per month, the general outcry was, "Why are we growing this crop? This crop is not worth our time". The revelation precipitated a total change in perspective once the real economics of producing the commodity were made clear.

The key lessons from the above discussion imply that markets drive land use practices, and though their influence may be only at the household level, their accumulative effects can have a profound impact on the environment, especially on landscapes settled by relatively poor, uneducated communities living near valued natural assets. While laws and donor-funded initiatives try to minimize this impact, the costs for doing so are often expensive and ineffective. This paper examines efforts by Wildlife Conservation Society to apply these lessons in Luangwa Valley, Zambia through an approach that reconfigures the way markets and agriculture can work together to sustain improved land management. These efforts have given rise to a model for rural development designed to impact favorably on biodiversity conservation and rural livelihoods, called Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO). This paper also reviews the results of this model and identifies important preconditions needed to adopt this model to rural landscapes while improving efforts to better manage protected areas in Africa.

harmful downside effects of misaligned markets, markets tend to out-survive the tenure of most donor projects and over the long-term, such problems may persist if not worsen.

Underlying this predicament is the fact that all major private sector interests associated with Luangwa Valley have excluded local community ownership. In essence, rural communities, despite their traditional ownership of the land, have had essentially little or no influence on the way markets are designed, shaped or benefit their own constituents or impact on their natural resources. This is perhaps not surprising, given the level of market skills and investment strengths that rural communities have, but nevertheless represents a critical impasse for finding a longer-term solution to managing ecosystems while sustaining community needs.

In response to this challenge, the Wildlife Conservation Society developed a model, called Community Markets for Conservation, or COMACO, that represents a business approach for engaging communities to plan and implement practical solutions for the management of natural resources across large, environmentally important landscapes. The approach operates around a shareholder-owned company, called Conservation Farmer and Wildlife Producer Trading Centre (CTC), which offers communities ownership in a business whose mandate is to build a better life for rural people around trade and conservation. The business is a large-scale trading enterprise designed to build market volume around selected commodities and production technologies that help improve food security, income opportunities and natural resource conservation. Qualified business managers and support staff, who are employed by the CTC, develop commercially successful products from commodities produced by participating communities. A key feature of the COMACO model is that producers earn substantial price incentives in exchange for adopting land use practices that reduce threats to natural resources. Unlike more centrist approaches to biodiversity conservation that rely on national authorities to enforce resource management regulations, COMACO is highly decentralized, household-focused, incentive-driven, and potentially self-financing.

The CTC operates through a network of trading depots located in rural areas, often in close proximity to a national forest or national park. Households who agree to take up improved farming and land use practices compatible with biodiversity conservation are asked to undertake training in these practices and to form producer groups, consisting usually of 10 to 20 members. Groups are then asked to elect leaders and approve by-laws that require members to adopt zero-tillage and other soil-enhancing practices and prohibit members from such acts as snaring of wildlife, poisoning fish, or burning crop residues. Upon meeting these requirements, producer group members are eligible for the higher commodity prices COMACO offers. The approach initially targets families who are poor and food impoverished, and thus most apt to rely on consumptive or illegal use of natural resources as a coping strategy.

Commodities purchased through the CTC are generally those that most any household can produce but in past years lacked sufficient market incentives to encourage improved technologies for production. Common commodities purchased include poultry, honey, rice, soybeans, and groundnuts. COMACO processes most of these purchased goods at the regional CTCs into higher-valued packaged products with its own environmentally branded trademark label, "It's Wild!", and markets them to high-end urban markets to leverage better prices for its producers. Board members, consisting largely of community representatives, convene during the year to review markets and commodity prices as well as procedures for leveraging conservation compliance through price incentives.

An important challenge for COMACO is to operate profitably while also meeting its community development and resource management mandates. It does this by keeping down its transaction costs in various ways:

?? ? acquisition of its own storage sheds,

?? ? HF radio communication to facilitate logistics between depots and trading centres,and

In summary, efforts to export the COMACO model to a new site should consider the following recommendations:

?? ? ?Start small-scale as a pilot initiative to build the COMACO process with local stewardship and the right links with local authorities, scaling up gradually as staff and infrastructure allow

?? ? ?Rely on implementing organizations that are committed and knowledgeable about the area with cost-cutting capacity to secure needed equipment and infrastructures for depots and regional trading centres

?? ? ?Rely on local staff with language and local knowledge skills to sustain on-going extension work

?? ? ?Rely on local leaders to help identify households who are most vulnerable and susceptible to contributing to resource degradation as initial targets for COMACO interventions

?? ? ?Develop business plans that target these households

?? ? ?Employ adaptive efforts to reduce transaction costs

?? ? ?Commit sufficient time and expertise to raise the needed financing for purchasing commodities to gain producer confidence in the COMACO model and compliance in conservation guidelines.

As a general model for rural development, COMACO was designed for landscapes where renewable resources were under threat from inappropriate land use practices and where settled land areas created potential land use threats to important biodiversity and protected areas. Its suitability as a general model under this context relies on various key assumptions:

?? ? The existence of practical locations and infrastructure that would provide a trading hub for residents of the target area

?? ? ?Environmental conflicts originate from selected households whose land use practices can be altered by offering market incentives from alternatives skills or commodities

?? ? ?Local stakeholders have a desire to manage their natural resources and be a good neighbor to a protected area.

If these conditions are met, as they do in Luangwa Valley, then there are arguments for expanding the number of trading centers to encompass Luangwa's national parks with increased rural access to legal market opportunities consistent with better land management practices. By increasing the number of trading centers, it becomes more feasible for trading centers to reduce various costs in terms of sharing assets, human capital and market access, allowing further optimization of the COMACO model by helping raise producer prices for continued compliance to conservation.

Scaling up the COMACO model and promoting economic positive feed-back for improved protected area management in Africa

COMACO's current experience in Luangwa Valley suggests a favorable environment for the COMACO model to continue to develop and grow while becoming a positive force for managing Luangwa Valley's natural resources. With this possible scaling-up, there are also increased opportunities for achieving an economic positive-feed back with the protected areas it operates around. This extension of the COMACO model, as explained below, provides an exciting formulation for protecting resource-rich landscapes in Africa.

COMACO's influence on reducing poaching and land use disturbances can significantly lower the cost of wildlife and habitat protection as COMACO's trade incentives and skills transfers encourage more favorable land use practices. Data from three biennual wildlife surveys suggest this influence has already contributed to a positive trend in wildlife populations and such trends will support increased opportunities for revenue growth from tourism both inside and outside the national parks.

The Zambia Wildlife Authority, whose legal mandate is to protect and develop wildlife resources throughout the country, sustains its management operations from tourism fees and thus needs to foster a successful tourism industry for its own sustainability. Growing human pressures around national parks and the resulting disturbances that often follow will likely be an on-going threat to wildlife conservation and to ZAWA's revenue base. ZAWA's capacity to police and manage such disturbances will likely be constrained due to its own institutional limitations in confronting and effectively supporting farm-based communities with land use solutions.

A more pragmatic and cost-saving approach would be for ZAWA to partner with COMACO to help mitigate these problems. This potential relationship could provide a strategic reason for ZAWA to invest in COMACO as a management partner to help resolve land use conflicts while building a stronger and more secure revenue base for park management. Such a relationship between COMACO and ZAWA would thus harness their collective resources and revenue streams to manage an ecosystem by helping steer local communities away from land use practices detrimental to wildlife and watersheds.

To achieve this synergy between ZAWA and COMACO as a strategy for natural resource conservation of the Luangwa Valley ecosystem,

?? ? ?COMACO needs to more effectively encompass the entire protected wildlife estate of Luangwa Valley, while

?? ? ZAWA needs to enhance the value of wildlife-based markets to demonstrate a stronger and greener economy for local communities through the benefits of tourism.

As COMACO works to reduce threats to wildlife by engaging farmers in appropriate land use practices and more environmentally friendly markets, the market value of national parks and wildlife use in surrounding areas will increase and so too will annual earnings for ZAWA to sustain its operating costs. By identifying appropriate ways COMACO and ZAWA can create mutual synergies of support, their own capacity to operate with increased sustainability will improve. A strategic business plan, which is outside the context of this paper, would complement ways these two entities could contribute to this synergy at relatively low cost with a significant "win-win" for each others objectives.

Conclusion

This paper draws attention to a question that demands greater understanding of the cross-cutting relationships between conservation and rural development: "How should a country manage human-settled landscapes around protected areas to ensure the total area is maintained as an intact, functioning ecosystem?"

Experiences in Zambia under the COMACO model suggest the answer is rooted in ways markets can be structured to improve the well-being of rural people while influencing land use practices. The on-going development and experimentation of the COMACO model in Luangwa Valley has revealed how quickly communities will shift land use practices when attracted to market incentives that motivate people to adopt improved ways of managing their land and resources. A conceptual extension of the COMACO model supports a more complete network of trading centers that could reduce the potential for land use threats surrounding all of Luangwa's national parks. This might also allow a more cost-effective use of shared resources with opportunities for enhanced marketing strategies between the different trading centres and could create an opportunity for a more synergistic relationship between COMACO and ZAWA to better sustain each other's long term goals.

D. Lewis wcszambia@uuplus.com