A balance in the making: cookstoves, a tree species and wildlife

Illegal trafficking halted…

A fuel-efficient cookstove that uses the small branches of a tree species called Gliricidia sepium is helping many thousands of smallholder farming families across Zambia’s Luangwa Valley have a better life and create more space for wildlife.

It is a story that started when we realized how farming practices were keeping farmers poor and often hungry by draining soils of their nutrients.  The results were lower yields, more land clearing, and a growing dependency on poaching for game meat to make ends meet.  From the delicate bushbuck to the magnificent elephant, no species was spared.  

When you live in Africa and admire the way forests and grasslands coexist and grow so productively, you wonder if the same coexistence could not be applied to farmland – that is to say, growing crops with trees.   Perhaps Nature has a solution that is staring in our face.   

What is needed is a tree that grows quickly, fixes nitrogen in the soil, draws up critical micronutrients from its roots, increases crop yields, and is easy for smallholders to plant as a replacement to fertilizer.  COMACO found the right tree:  Gliricidia sepium.  That was eight years ago.

Today over 60,000 small holders are using Gliricidia and achieving yields comparable to yields produced with chemical fertilizers.  With the help of COMACO, over 25 million seedlings are planted annually in farm plots across the Luangwa Valley ecosystem.   In reality, we’re recreating the African savannah but with food crops!

With low input costs made possible by Gliricidia and helped along by the good market prices that COMACO offers for crops when farmers use sustainable farming practices,  smallholder farmers, many of whom once poached, are now making a profit farming.   In turn, COMACO manufactures the crops it buys from these farmers into a range of healthy, chemical-free food products it sells under the brand, It’s Wild! and the proceeds help to sustain the process. But there is more to the story than increasing yields, helping farmers out of poverty, and turning poachers into farmers.  

The same tree is also an excellent source of fuel wood.  At the time when farmers begin to plant their crops, they cut these trees knee height to allow sun exposure to emerging crops.  The process is called coppicing and the trees grow back in several months.  The cut stems, referred to as off-cuts, become a potential source of firewood for cooking.  This reduces the need for women to walk long distances to cut wood from local forests.   It is also in these forests where local residents in search of firewood risk injury from wild animals.  It does happen, from snake bites to an accidental and sometimes fatal encounter with an elephant or lion.

What if there were a more efficient way of burning Gliricidia off-cuts for cooking so that women would never have to go in search of firewood from forests?   Think of the time women could save to care for their children, garden or raise more chickens. 

The story continues.  COMACO, together with its partner, CQuest, introduced a fuel-efficient stove with only three metal parts and built with locally molded bricks.   We were unsure whether families, particularly women, would accept these stoves and give up their traditional way of cooking over open fires using logs extracted from their local forests.  We quickly realized we had a solution and a way of linking sustainable agriculture to sustainable fuelwood production that reduces pressures on habitat and removes the need to poach wildlife.   

Thousands of farmers, mostly women, are now harvesting a full year’s supply of fuel wood from their farm plots in just 1-2 days as compared to over 30-32 days of gathering the same supply of firewood from nearby forests.   We estimate that Gliricidia as an alternative source of firewood is reducing annual tree loss by at least 5-7 trees per family.   This may not seem like much, but accumulatively over time, COMACO is literally saving forests and ultimately an entire watershed if we can continue to scale the adoption of Gliricidia-based farming.  

Today, over 80,000 of these stoves are in use.  They are perfectly designed for burning more efficiently the relatively small-stem off-cuts of Gliricidia and bringing relief to women who can now avoid the ill-effects of cooking over open fires and breathing the toxic smoke fumes.   Such benefits are accelerating the adoption of Gliricidia as a way of supporting family food needs and increased incomes. 

Innovative technologies that mimic nature, a little ingenuity, and market incentives that help drive the process are transforming the lives of smallholder farmers and tipping the balance toward safer forests and less threatened wildlife.   The story is not finished, however.   The final story will be told when Gliricidia and its partner cookstove are an integral part of an evolving ecology of the Luangwa Valley ecosystem that will ensure such wild animals like the elephant have a secure place in Africa’s future. 

You can help us make this future happen.  We have set up a special fund-raising drive that supports farmer prosperity, wildlife conservation and climate change management. The program will include teaching farmers to plant nitrogen-fixing trees with their food crops and supplying efficient cookstoves which use surplus wood produced by these trees. This will create a virtuous cycle of higher food yield, higher incomes which then translate to reduced poaching and more climate resilient ecosystems that benefit the local community as well as the global ecosystem.

Thank you!

Dale Lewis, COMACO CEO