The Life of a Typical Farmer - Why Care?

A farmer’s life in Luangwa Valley, Zambia is not easy. Imagine raising a family of six from an annual harvest of just four bags of maize with an annual income of less than $100. When food runs out, one or both parents will look for work elsewhere, leaving children in the care of an aging grandparent or an elder sibling to tend farm fields. Crop yields suffer and children miss school attendance. Often the only real skill children might learn will be what their parents teach them. For most families parents are poorly educated themselves and have few options on ways to provide for family members. Household-headed men, for example, often spend much of their time engaged in such activities as fishing, making charcoal or poaching wildlife to help make a little extra money to buy food and other essentials. Regrettably and without alternatives, these are the skills that are passed on to the next generation. Some might argue that people have managed to live this way in the past, and if people can make ends meet, then why care?

People can adapt and face enormous challenges of low income and uncertain food supplies, but at what cost? Surrounded by a wealth of such natural resources as wildlife, fish and trees, as is the case in Luangwa Valley, people come to rely on these resources to satisfy their family needs. As both needs and numbers of people increase, so too does rate of resource depletion increase. No one can blame poor people for finding ways to survive from their natural resources, but the tragic result is a poorer landscape and ultimately a poorer human population.

When a landscape is populated by poor, unskilled, and often uneducated farmers, the underlying truth is that they are more apt to endanger the land by mismanaging the soils and over-exploiting the surrounding resources. COMACO recognized this relationship and its particular importance to conserving wildlife in adjacent wildlife protected areas when it started its important work over five years ago. Under the leadership of Wildlife Conservation Society, it has built a strong foundation around training and mobilizing farmers into producer groups to more effectively apply new skills through market incentives COMACO has helped developed. It has been a massive undertaking to build up a producer organization of almost 32,000 farmers with an established and growing market for the commodities they can produce as alternatives to poaching or other destructive uses of natural resources. Today, they manage their soils with locally made organic fertilizers and better farming practices and they have diversified food crops to cushion again the effects of floods or drought with improved yields of key food crops by over 20%. Lives have changed and so to have their relationship to natural resources changes.

Lista Zulu from Chikwenya village is now a registered COMACO farmer. Before she joined the program, she faced a desperate situation of poverty. Farming had failed her but there was no other means to support her family, comprising of 16 members. It was impossible for her to set aside some money to buy inputs. She made a loan to buy fertilizers but could not pay back. COMACO has changed everything for Lista. She has found real hope in farming and today produces enough crops for sale and home consumption

“I don’t need to acquire a loan for me to grow crops any more. I use compost for my fertilizer and use ububa (Tephrosia vogelli) to control insect pests. I have a big family and I am supporting all these people through the sell of rice and other crops through COMACO. I am also able to take my children to school and buy essentials for my house. COMACO understands our problems and how to help us care for our land. It is really changing how we live”.

Climate, markets and human needs are all part of the changing world and challenges COMACO faces as it builds enduring solutions for conservation. We want you to hear the stories about this work that will take you into rural and often remote areas of Zambia where COMACO works. Here you will see a process unfolding – one family, one farm at a time – guided by better farm production practices that empower people to be more responsible for soils, trends and wildlife. We look forward to sharing these stories in our future newsletter editions.