COMACO Helps Farmers With Seed

Farming is a principle source of food and income for most rural communities in Zambia. However, many of these people find it very difficult to maximise their potential in farming because improved seed varieties are too expensive and not easily accessible.

To make seeds more available to rural farmers in its effort to also link farming to better conservation of natural resources, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) through its Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO) programme, is implementing a seed recovery loan initiative. Under this initiative, farmers who show compliance to conservation farming and who refrain from poaching or cutting down trees to make charcoal are offered seeds with the promise that the same amount of seed is returned after the next harvesting season.

COMACO is supporting approximately 10,000 farmers with different seed varieties in Lundazi, Chama, Mambwe and Luangwa Districts. The seeds include early maturing maize, cowpeas, groundnuts, cassava, sweet potatoes, rice and Soya beans. In addition, the programme is also supporting hundreds of bee-keeping farmers with modern bee-hives to produce high quality honey.

This year, COMACO has supported this initiative with seed varieties worth K115 million from its own inventory of selected seed varieties proven to be good yielding and commercially viable. Each farmer on average received about 10 kgs of each type of seed.

COMACO is also providing markets for these crops at favourable prices to enable farmers earn a better living without having to rely on destructive uses of natural resources. For a long time now, rural farmers have been exploited by briefcase business men who buy their crops at very low prices. COMACO is offering better prices for their crops to help reap something worthwhile out of their hard work.

Lundazi Regional Coordinator Nemiah Tembo said COMACO decided to introduce this project to help farmers with difficulties in accessing improved seed varieties. “The farmers have been having problems to buy improved seed varieties to plant every year, this is because seeds are generally expensive. Under the Wildlife Conservation Society-led COMACO programme, we are trying to assist and train farmers to breed improved seed and we are doing this by giving them seed as a simple loan without cash repayment,” revealed Mr. Tembo

He further disclosed that COMACO was supporting farmers with seed in order to establish seasoned farmers that would be able to sell some of their crops to the programme every year. COMACO is running a processing plant in Lundazi where it is processing groundnuts into peanut butter, Soya beans into yummy soy and honey into high quality bottled honey. The programme entirely depends on the local farmers for raw materials to effectively run the process plant.

“As COMACO expands, we want to have our own farmers who can sell us some of their crops since we are supporting them with inputs. We also want them to have good viable seeds that will improve production and yields to meet our intended goal, especially meeting our targets that have been set into our business plan,” said Mr Tembo.

He noted that through this initiative, the poor rural communities were becoming food secure with better yields of food crops, whose surplus could also be a cash crop.

With the onset of the rainy season, most farmers in these areas have already finished planting their fields. Some farmers talked to disclosed that they have greatly benefited from the initiative by having access to seed varieties which they could not afford on their own in the past.

Jane Ngoma of Kakumbi Chiefdom joined the COMACO programme in 2005 and since then she has been receiving inputs from COMACO. Last year, she received 10Kgs of rice and later harvested 650Kgs of paddy rice and sold some of her produce to the programme. “I sold out 250Kgs of rice to COMACO from which I managed to buy household goods and food. This initiative has really helped me to better my life because I am able to realise income from the crops,” said Ngoma. This year, Ngoma received new variety of rice seed and pledged to produce more rice.

Another beneficiary Loyce Liyonda of Chief Mnkhanya in Luangwa valley lost all her food crops last year through the floods that they experienced in 2006/07 farming season. However she managed to harvest 250kgs of paddy rice and sold 100Kg to COMACO and exchanged the 150Kgs with Maize.

Since 2001, COMACO has been supporting rural farmers with farming inputs. The response has been overwhelming and COMACO is considering introducing this project in Northern, Lusaka and part of Central province to target more vulnerable but viable farmers. COMACO has benefited enormously from the World Food Programme and the Royal Norwegian Embassy from their respective investments in this pilot programme that is striving to become fully self-financing by 2010.