Rural Income

Aid, Not Trade

COMACO is an honest company.  It gives us the best price and pays on time and still helps us with inputs and skills – we are safe with COMACO”, explains Samuel Phiri, a local farmer from Nsefu area.  Where people may have had to supplement income by making charcoal, catching fish or even selling game meat illegally, COMACO is driving a local village economy around markets that also help local communities to protect their natural resources.  When COMACO started, there were relatively few commodity markets available other than maize, cotton and tobacco.  COMACO had to support local farmers with seed inputs and drive consumer interest in products that could sustain the level of cash incentives for farmers to stay committed to conservation practices.

Many cynics of COMACO must have thought this pioneering little company would have fallen flat on its face, but these cynics failed to understand the needs that families faced all over the Luangwa Valley and their willingness to produce new crops if prices were favorable.  As more farmers recognized the serious commitment COMACO was making, they too became more serious as farmers have joined together as partners in the effort to use markets as a tool for food security, poverty reduction and conservation.  Not aid, but trade – directed at the right crops that if grown the right way can reduce pressures on wildlife and habitat.

The motivation by farmers who have joined COMACO is obviously not to conserve, but to better their lives.  COMACO understands this and much of its efforts is far removed from the wild animals it seeks to help protect.  Much more of its time and energy is spent worrying about how to bring the 1000’s of tons of commodities it buys from farmers into a commercial pipeline of value-added processing and that can end up on a shelf with a commanding price that gets returned to farmers for complying with required farming practices that help conserve.  It is the indirect, secondary effects of COMACO’s markets on changing peoples’ lives that has such a profound influence on wildlife conservation.  It is a new paradigm for conservation that COMACO believes could be extended to help manage and protect entire ecosystems. 

Out of the 34,000 registered COMACO farmers, approximately 16,000 sold their surplus to COMACO in 2009.  In 2000, when a pre-COMACO baseline survey was conducted on a random sample of 1200 farmers, annual family income was only about $80.   In comparison, average annual income among COMACO farmers where this survey was undertaken has increased to about $200.  With continued efforts to diversify crops, add more value to commodities with value-added products made from by-products, and increase opportunities from non-timber forest products, this figure will most certainly increase in the years ahead.