Business Results
The COMACO business mission is to run a successful business around products that can sustain and offer the producers of these products an added value incentive for adopting improved land use practices on a scale that can achieve significant improvements in natural resource conservation across an entire ecosystem. Because so many people in rural Zambia are farmers, most of the products COMACO currently markets are associated with agriculture, such as polished rice, peanut butter, roasted ground nuts, and soybean-based food products.
From seed to shelf, COMACO manages the entire supply chain on behalf of producers, who in turn agree to cooperate with efforts to improve the conservation of natural resources. COMACO uses a network of trading depots in remote rural areas to ensure poor, more marginalized farmers can mobilize their produce to collecting points where transactions are carried out and produce is collected so that processing, packaging and distribution of products directed from the regional trading centres.
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Though COMACO seeks to help poor people while also improving opportunities for sustaining conservation results, COMACO must operate as a viable and competitive business. The bottom-line is sustainability. COMACO has the enormous challenge of meeting important social and environmental constraints which makes the objective of achieving sustainability a real challenge. On the one hand, COMACO sustains self-employment for 10,000s but targets its efforts at those who are least skilled as farmers and who otherwise might poach wildlife or rely on making charcoal as an added source of income. In order to motivate farmers to abandon destructive land use practices, it must offer competitive prices for more desirable commodities than other commercial interests who compete for the same land the same farmers. This literally means giving away a portion of its potential profits at the early stage of COMACO's development at a particular trading centre, which operates as a franchise of its mother company, registered as Conservation Farmer Wildlife Producer Trading Centre (or CTC). To overcome this initial hurdle of meeting its variable and fixed costs, WCS seeks grants and appropriate forms of financing to enable a CTC to begin to meet its own costs for managing all the components of its business enterprise in the shortest time possible. Based on its first CTC in Lundazi, this takes approximately 3 to 4 years. The table below provides a breakdown proft/loss statements for the major products produced by this CTC, showing a significant improvement in production in 2006 with a corresponding project net revenue gain for the same year (figures given in Zambia kwacha, $1 = ZK3800). COMACO's fiscal year ends in May with the beginning of sales for the previous seasons farming harvest. BACK TO TOP
