A Conservation Company Brings Added Value for Zambia

Conservation has found new meaning in Zambia, where hopeful solutions to land degradation and natural resource destruction show promise of working, restoring wildlife, habitat and watersheds. In this first newsletter, learn more about this unfolding and important story in Africa.

In village after village across much of Luangwa Valley, songs of praise kindle a local fervor for this new approach to conservation that is bringing a better life to tens of thousands. Families, who once experienced the pain of hunger because they could not grow enough food and had to rely on destructive and sometime dangerous use of natural resources to make ends meet, now have a better alternative. For the first time in their memory, a “company” has become a partner with the poor, teaching them skills to benefit from better-paying markets designed to help stimulate food crop production and reduce harmful land use practices. This is no ordinary company. This company, known appropriately as Community Markets for Conservation or COMACO, builds markets for rural communities through conservation.

To succeed, COMACO must survive a competitive landscape where more established and larger companies have access to finance and management skills to support the continued wealth generation of their company owners. In contrast, COMACO builds income security for unskilled poor farmers through the production of products that help achieve conservation results and promote food production. For over 30,000 families, and growing, COMACO has created an infrastructure of extension services, trading depots and processing and trading hubs across a vast rural landscape to enhance market incentives for the protection of soils, trees and wildlife. Its mission mirrors its own triple bottom-line accounting of business success: human well-being, conservation and economic sustainability.

The results are exciting, uniquely African and hold much promise for conserving Africa’s great natural wealth. Destructive fires that once burned watersheds and killed trees are now declining; thousands of wild animals, including lions and elephants, are being spared the agonizing death of a wire snare or a bullet; and soils are maintained with nutrients needed to boost food crop production. COMACO’s trade benefits help drive these results by transforming farmers, and sometimes poachers, to accept improved farming methods and particular crops that are better for the land. As better farmers, families have more income and more food, children are now able to attend school and receive health care, and people are finding it easier to accept conservation than being forced to under the punitive threat of arrest.

COMACO is an emerging new model that links conservation with rural development, and rural people in Luangwa Valley are rejoicing as they see a better life through the skills and markets that COMACO offers. If people can secure their own family’s welfare through the adoption of conservation practices, then they are more apt to teach future generations the value of conservation with the skills acquired from COMACO than those they once used that degraded land and depleted wildlife. Africa just got a little safer and greener, thanks to COMACO!

Increasingly, COMACO has come under the watchful eyes of both skeptics and supporters as it struggles to succeed as a viable business to sustain these results. Zambia has taken up this struggle because it sees no other obvious alternative to face the growing challenges of land degradation and poverty, especially across such a treasured landscape as the Luangwa Valley, considered by most to be Zambia’s “Yellowstone”. This newsletter provides a monthly account of this struggle, both its successes and setbacks, as COMACO forges a more permanent solution for conservation by bringing people and responsible, well-guided markets together as a land management approach.

COMACO has a five-year track record under the leadership of Wildlife Conservation Society, which helped conceive the model and oversees its implementation to fully test the model and to analyze its full economic value to the country’s development. Working with a growing number of partners, COMACO manufactures raw commodities into eight value-added consumer products and distributes them to retail stores throughout the country. Its own brand name, It’s Wild!, resonates a national spirit for conservation and something good and natural, and healthy to consume. When seeing this brand on the shelf, Zambians are reminded to make Zambia a little ‘greener’ by buying an It’s Wild! product and paying a little more to help support COMACO’s mission. It is this added value that rewards producers for growing commodities with the conservation practices prescribed by COMACO. From its own cash flow, COMACO is now injecting annually into rural communities hundreds of thousands of US dollars in local currency for growing soybeans, paddy rice, groundnuts (or peanuts), honey and red beans with farming practices designed to improve soils and reduce tree loss. Since it began, COMACO has increased the economic value of these commodities to producers by 100 to 200%. It also provides effective seed replication services to maintain low-cost seed inputs for increased crop diversity.

Today, farmers have an alternative to poaching wildlife, an alternative to poisoning a waterhole to harvest fish, and an alternative to clearing a forest to make charcoal. Poor farmers no longer have to bear the opportunity costs for conservation, but instead can derive an economic gain by subscribing to it. It is a great story and one that will grow as COMACO continues to reach out and impact on more and more rural people across Zambia. It is a story you will want to follow and we will report to you in our monthly COMACO newsletter.