19 Years and Counting – COMACO’s History of Building a Green Economy

19 years and counting – COMACO’s history of building a Green Economy offers a platform for the new Zambian government

COMACO sees small-scale farmers as critical to a Zambian Green Economy where commerce grows, biodiversity drives, and greenhouse gas emissions reduce. Making this happen requires a strong partnership between the private sector and small-scale farmers committed to ecologically sustainable practices driven by market incentives.  19 years developing such an approach have given COMACO a strong platform for helping build a Green Economy for Zambia.

We congratulate our new President, H.E. Hakainde Hichilema, for his visionary leadership to reverse years of land degradation and biodiversity loss in Zambia that have dragged rural communities into hardships.  With a Green Economy, this does not happen.  Instead, a nation prospers in balance with Nature. In this blog we share our approach with insights for a government ready to take the right steps.

Years of misinformation that chemical inputs will sustain smallholders’ livelihoods have proven false and expensive.  Failed farms abound that have fueled an urban migration, swelling townships with chronic poverty, leaving others dependent on charcoal or game meat to make ends meet. COMACO is solving these problems.

We first organize farmers into “producer learning groups” and provide year-round training on nature-based ways to replenish soil nutrients and restore life back to the soils.  These practices return organic matter, mostly crop residues, back to the soil and use specific tree species to recycle critical nutrients and fix nitrogen to feed the crops.  Within 2-3 years we help farmers eliminate the need for chemical fertilizers, which are a major source of greenhouse gases and global warming and can cost farmers as much as 25% of their annual income.

For each of the 86 chiefdoms COMACO supports, we organize these producer groups into cooperatives whose leaders help encourage these practices.  COMACO strengthens compliance to these practices by paying farmers premium prices for crops produced in this way to manufacture into our chemical-free, It’s Wild! branded food products.  From their annual membership fees, these cooperatives eventually take over farmer training with their own community trainers.  To date, COMACO has established 91 such cooperatives.  Compared to pre-COMACO statistics, farmer income has more than tripled and food insecurity is far less a risk.

An important outcome is that farmers become sedentary because healthy soils allow continuous harvests, especially if rotation with legume crops is practiced in tandem with soil-enriching trees.  COMACO manufactures legumes like groundnuts, soybeans and cowpeas into value-added products to help make this happen.  With more sedentary farmers, fewer trees are cut down, and communities are able to benefit from forest products like honey and wild mushrooms, adding more market incentives to forest protection.

This relationship between farmers and forests is a critical one because it underpins another major market opportunity for building a Green Economy – sale of carbon credits.  For the past seven years COMACO has helped communities realize these market returns as farmers use their new farming skills to put carbon into the soil and keep carbon in trees by not clearing and burning them. Even consumption of firewood from local forests for cooking is eliminated by using fuel-efficient stoves that COMACO distributes that use off-cuts from the trees that farmers use to fertilize their soils.

COMACO calculates the tonnage of reduced emissions of CO₂ relative to emissions would have occurred without these interventions.  To date, we have achieved over 4 million tons of reduced CO₂ emissions. The amount will likely double over the next three years as more chiefdoms demonstrate their CO₂ emission reductions to help fight global warming and be compensated with carbon payments in excess of $2 million annually.

With these positive impacts on farmer incomes, increased community earnings from carbon, and market growth from the sale of It’s Wild! products, COMACO contributes to a net income flow into the Zambian economy of over $10 million annually.  We estimate a comparable potential amount saved by avoided fertilizer costs.    COMACO’s ability to sustain and scale this level of impact is made possible because it operates in Zambia as a non-profit social enterprise.  COMACO’s goal is to make conservation profitable for small-scale farmers and not make profits for itself.  Our bottom-line target is sustainability.

COMACO is ready to join our new Zambian President to help bring a Green Economy to the Zambian people to a national scale.  For 19 years COMACO has waited for this opportunity.  It is an auspicious time for conservation where we can all unite – traditional leaders, farmers, private sector, and consumers – to help our President on this important journey.

Dale Lewis, CEO