Poor Market Development

LOCAL MARKET ACCESS MEANS FARMER SUCCESS!

You're a rural Zambian farmer, living in a thatched roof hut in the Luangwa Valley with your elderly father and 4 small children. Your tools are a hand hoe, a pointed stick and a strong back. You have few neighbors and limited access to inputs or trade, as the "road" near your village is a narrow, dirt trail, under water half the year. You hacked out your plot of land by hand, after burning off the existing trees, and you've been planting maize for several years. The rains were late this year, and the plants struggled to take hold. When the rains did come, so did the insects, which nibbled away at the setting ears.  You send the children out to battle the insects, only to see elephants come to eat what maize you managed to save. Despite all of this, you manage to harvest a little extra corn. Maybe two 25kg bags can be sold this year to pay school fees. But how to get it to market? The nearest grain depot is over 60 kilometers away. You have no car, no donkey, no bicycle, and a vehicle ferry into town - when one is available - will cost more than the grain will fetch.

When the briefcase men from the city show up in their trucks and offer you plastic shoes or a new kitchen pot for your bags of grain, you don't want it, but you take it, thinking maybe you can sell these instead. There's no one to buy and within a month the shoes are broken and the pot handle is gone, as is your extra corn.

This is the pitiful scenario common to many parts of rural Zambia. Lack of farming tools and skills, coupled with depleted soil, lack of roads, poor agricultural support and unscrupulous  opportunists leave the rural farmer with little option but to turn to poaching and charcoaling to supplement food and cash needed by the family.

COMACO recognized the role that a lack of infrastructure and rurally placed depots played in the exacerbation of poverty among Zambia's rural farmers, so COMACO is bringing the grain depot to the farms. COMACO's conservation trading center (CTC's), offers rural communities living around protected areas access to high paying markets and a range of services to help farmers bulk and sell their commodities. Substations, referred to as trading depots, are located at critical points throughout the communities COMACO works to economize on storage and transport costs.  The current network of CTCs and trading depots cover about 80% of the Luangwa Valley and provide market access for well over 100,000 families, meeting head-on the challenges of poverty, hunger and environmental mismanagement.  

As a company, COMACO develops its own business success through its close collaboration with these same farmers.  By showing poor farmers respect and helping them overcome their problems with skills, inputs, and fair market prices,  COMACO believes they will become not only loyal producers of commodities for the various products that COMACO manufactures and sells to consumers, but also good farm producers who can meet company targets.  This is exactly what COMACO is achieving, but the business partnership between COMACO and farmer is one based on the “deal” that the trade benefits come only if producers remain committed to the right farm and land use practices.  Farmers now know that if they accept this “deal”, there WILL BE a buyer who will pay a fair price in cash money, giving them an incentive to farm instead of poach or charcoal. To read more about the market support approach, click here.