Conservation solutions – COMACO has answers

Loveness Mwape from Makasa Village of Chitambo Chiefdom reflects on her family’s situation in 2018, “My husband did his best to feed my family by poaching wildlife. He could not stop because we would suffer and conservation did not give us a better way to live.”

This past year COMACO came to Loveness‘s village to buy rice, a common crop for the area. It was the first time she and her husband have ever experienced a cash market. Previously, traders bartered their crops for cheap merchandise. It was only game meat that was sold across the border to DRC where her husband could earn money. Though he had never been arrested, he knew the risks could send him to prison.

Loveness describes the decision she and her husband recently made to avoid this fate, “when COMACO paid for our rice and showed us how much it was worth when we practice the farming skills we were taught, I told my husband it was better to stop poaching and he agreed to surrender his firearm. We can understand conservation now because COMACO has given us markets.”

Since COMACO began operations, 1,780 farmers like Loveness‘s husband have surrendered their firearms voluntarily, but the conservation problem is much greater than just poaching wildlife. It is also the environmental harm that farming causes when the wrong way of farming depletes soil nutrients and forces farmers to clear more land, resulting in fewer forests and less habitat for wildlife. This is the conservation crisis Zambia faces today.

Over 1,780, farmers like Loveness‘s husband have surrendered their firearms voluntarily since COMACO began working in Zambia.

Reversing this problem on a scale that can have an impact requires a collective effort by hundreds of thousands of farmers motivated to heal their land with farming practices that allow farmers to keep farming the same plot productively and indefinitely. COMACO is proving this is possible when market incentives and cost-savings drive the transformation.

Conservation business

This year, for example, there are over 61% of farmers that are doing “conservation business” with COMACO will be planting over 36 million agroforestry trees to help repair their soils. Not only are these farmers making significant cash savings by not having to buy expensive chemical fertilizers, but they are also building up carbon in the soil by sucking CO2 out of the air. Soil carbon is a key ingredient to healthy soils and can add additional revenue from the sale of this carbon as carbon credits on the open carbon market. Not only is COMACO helping farmers to realize this added carbon value by adopting an agroforestry farming system, but it is also helping 5,000 of its groundnut farmers to become organically certified producers to gain additional income from better-paying export markets.

With this emphasis on the needs of farmers and the resources they live with, COMACO has taken the long, hard road in building a viable business to serve conservation first and profits second. By staying the course, COMACO is proving the two can serve each other to find a more lasting solution for conservation.