Solutions

Poverty, illiteracy, and hunger cripple lives and undermine opportunities to manage natural resources sustainably. COMACO takes the view that conservation can be a source of solutions to these problems if harnessed by the right kind of markets that promote environmentally safe products and production practices. It requires an organization of responsible and motivated people who can manage an effective program of extending skills and knowledge to marginalized, economically depressed areas. It is also an organization of qualified people who can move commodities produced by rural communities through a supply chain into finished, quality products that sustain producer prices while adding value to conservation. It is an equation for rural development in Africa.

External markets often drive rural economies, and in many instances they are not always sensitive to the needs of the land. If left unchecked, these market influences can leave rural people with fewer choices to plan and sustain their livelihoods if natural resources become degraded, thus increasing future risks of hardships and suffering. Rather than be driven by such influences, COMACO helps rural communities plan their own future around markets they can choose and which are also good for their land, hence its name, "Community Markets for Conservation" or COMACO.

The "Solutions" box to the left accesses more detailed information about the various solutions COMACO and its partners support. Each of these solutions contribute to the various steps that the COMACO model operate by. These steps are listed below. By no means are the various technologies, production practices and strategies adopted by COMACO complete. COMACO continues to evolve and learn new ways to enhance the relationship between rural development and conservation, but the list provided gives a good understanding of the progress and commitment COMACO has reached thus far.

The key steps of implementation the COMACO model follows are as follows:

• Survey and assess household income and food security. This establishes a baseline to plan markets and training interventions and a basis for targeting households for participation in COMACO.

• Achieve food security among households selected as food-impoverished. This step involves a number of interventions designed to increase production of food crops and secondarily, cash crops. Included in this step is the formation of farmer producer groups, the primary producers and beneficiaries of COMACO.

• Formulate community-based land use plans that promote better farming methods and land use practices conducive to wildlife production and other conservation objectives. Community leaders help lead this process with assistance from COMACO. These plans are simple and target village groupings, called Village Area Groups or VAGs, based on their own decisions to eliminate key threats affecting natural resources in their area.

• Facilitate improved producer prices through a network of rural trading depots linked to a regional community trading centre (CTC). The CTC works to improve market linkages with the trading depots by enhancing trading partners and marketing opportunities through value-added processing and packaging that attract consumer interest in the social and environmental benefits associated with these products.

• Make household compliance to the adopted land use plan a condition for receiving trade benefits from the trading centre. This step requires effective verification procedures linked to trade benefits tied to compliance.

• Formalize the regional trading centre into a branch (franchise) of the non-profit parent company, Conservation Farmer Wildlife Producer Trading Centre (CTC), with producer membership on its Board for increasing community-wide support for trade in products that enhance conservation success. COMACO facilitates community shareholder ownership of the CTC as non-profit registered company, whose articles of association require all net revenues be reinvested to increase food security, rural income and conservation.

• Manage each trading centre branch (franchise) as a self-financing business for sustaining farmer commitment to improved land use practices and increased food security linked to parallel efforts to improve business plans and strategic planning decisions for the sustainability of each CTC branch.

• Develop improved market opportunities at both the national and international level. In seeking improved producer prices for registered CTC producer groups, COMACO works to develop new products and market opportunities for giving COMACO producer group members the best prices possible for goods and services in exchange for long-term commitment to conservation guidelines.

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