World Food Program (WFP)

WFP has traditionally helped Zambia and other countries around the world with acute needs of food shortages where people's lives were at risk from starvation and malnutrition. Rather than limiting assistance only to such crises of food shortages, WFP in Zambia began a program with WCS to develop more proactive ways WFP could use its food support to help build more sustainable and productive farming practices. Much of the WFP support to COMACO has been in the form of maize to help food-impoverished families with enough food for one farming season to learn and adopt better farming methods for an increased yield to sustain food needs the following year. Through this WFP support the COMACO model developed to help replace the dependency on WFP maize with longer-term market incentives to keep farmers motivated to practice better farming methods.