On one such day, the rattle of automatic gunfire laid waste to a family of 15 elephants across the Luangwa River from where I lived. Their screams were human-like as they anguished their final minutes. I listened helplessly, unable to defend the animals I had come to know. It was hard to understand how humans could inflict such destruction and suffering.

Some days later I was given a chance to meet the same gang of elephant poachers who had been arrested by the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Service scouts. They were handcuffed and sitting on the ground when I arrived to interview them. I was not expecting the revelation.

Some years later I met a grain trader who told me how he had become rich. His secret was simple, start buying from farmers soon after the harvest because that is when they are the poorest and you can buy at very low prices to make good profits.

The scenario did not bode well for elephants or wildlife in general. Both legal and illegal markets took advantage of the prevailing ignorance and poverty that afflicted so many small-scale farmers. For many poor farmers, law enforcement was an infraction and threat to their livelihoods.

COMACO is an accumulation of these lessons that allowed us to ask the right question. Could we find the markets and business approach to make conservation profitable enough for farmers to stop the needless loss of wildlife and habitat and still run as a sustainable enterprise? We challenged conventional wisdom in 2003 with our first product, Chama Rice, sold under the brand It’s Wild! and grown by farmers who lived with elephants, often down the barrel of a gun. We quadrupled the price that farmers were previously earning from a local trader and we asked them to surrender their guns in return.

Since then, over 1763 firearms have been surrendered. Today we’re selling 17 products all coming from small-scale farmers, many of whom have abandoned their old ways of poaching and charcoal-making. Improved farming skills and better markets have replaced the need for poaching. Farming communities, unlike before, are organized into cooperatives and have joined COMACO as business partners to bring their food surplus to market and help market the It’s Wild! brand by incorporating their stories of how they’re making conservation work for them.

This year we’ll be buying over 11,000 tons of farm produce from over 30,000 farmers with It’s Wild! sales growing each year. Equally important, we’re operating in the black and have opened markets in South Africa, Botswana and soon the USA.

It has been a journey made possible by people who believed in our mission and the fight in our stomach to make it succeed. They helped with their money in an untested model. It is their story I find so remarkable and critical to the trajectory we’re on today. They know who they are and I hope they will read this blog to understand and appreciate what they have helped to achieve for Africa, its farmers and its wildlife. COMACO has given them a chance to invest in conservation and realize their required returns on investment. For many, the impact of more wildlife and forests or families with more food and income was sufficient to meet their investment goals. For others, the investment has been paid back with interest and for others, the interest was returned to allow COMACO to sustain our annual conservation dividend payment when communities meet a set of conservation standards.

Through these investments, COMACO has been able to work on a scale where only conservation can succeed by supporting not a few hundred families but hundreds of thousands across an entire ecosystem like Luangwa Valley. The collaboration with our investors and grantors have created financing mechanisms and strategies that made this scale possible, created a revolving fund for crop buying that reduces our debt burden, established an organization that has made management and farmer operate as one, and have turned every label on a product we sell into a billboard to help tell our story to markets far and wide.

With backing from the Zambian government, COMACO is expanding its operations to support other landscapes and communities mired in poverty with markets that can deliver the needed solutions for conservation. It will take continued investments in more beehives, more training manuals and skills training, more community protected forests and wildlife habitat, more warehouses, better processing equipment, and so much more.

We hope to make It’s Wild! the African brand for conservation that one day will source from many hundreds of thousands of farmers ready to conserve for the markets ready to pay. This is why we will keep Africa’s elephants. We’ve seen it work in Luangwa Valley and it can work elsewhere too. I’d like to invite you to contact me directly if you would be interested in helping make this journey possible with your support. | www.linkedin.com/

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

Farmers from five COMACO cooperatives in Katete had an idea – to plan a farmer exchange visit with farmers from Mwasemphangwe Chiefdom within Lundazi District to learn how to better protect the environment.

Farmers from Mwasemphangwe and Katete sharing ideas

The Katete-based farmers pooled their resources, and on Thursday the 20th of September, the farmer exchange visit finally took place when farmers from Katete visited farmers in Mwasemphangwe Chiefdom.

The aim of the farmer exchange visit was to allow the farmers from these two districts, which are 3.5 hours apart, an opportunity to exchange knowledge on how to reduce deforestation, charcoal production, and poaching. 

Route between Katete and Mwasemphangwe Chiefdom in Lundazi District

It was noticed that as you move along Great East Road near Katate, the sale of charcoal is rampant compared to the road toward Lundazi. Further, it is evident that the the vegetation along the Lundazi Road is much denser and healthier. This disparity is perhaps not a coincidence: COMACO has been working with over 3,000 famers in Mwasemphangwe for nearly 15 years, whereas, COMACO has only been working in Katete for 3 years.

Charcoal for sale along Great East Road in Katete

Based on the observations, farmers from Katete wanted to learn best practices from their farmer friends in Lundazi so they can implement these environmental protection strategies in and around Katete. The farmers from the two areas spent time in conversation, exchanging ideas and tactics to support their environment.

[/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][blockquote style=”left_border” font_size=”24px” color=”#9e9e9e” source=”Mr. Sam Munkombwe, COMACO Regional Coordinator”] “The farmer exchange visit will profoundly benefit the Katete farmers and their chiefs”[/blockquote]

The COMACO farmers were welcomed to the palace in Mwasemphangwe and were accompanied by several high-ranking individuals  from the area, including:

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• Headman Chipuka from Mbangombe Village
• Representative for Chief Chilupako from Kathumba Village
• Representative for Chief Ngwangwa from Kawaza Village and
• Representative for Chief Mwasemphangwe – Mr. Banda Gabriel[/list_style][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1454241148818{padding-top: 10px !important;}”][vc_column width=”1″]

Farmers visiting the Palace in Mwasemphangwe Chiefdom

During the farmer exchange visit, the farmers from Mwasemphangwe showed the farmers from Katete their thriving Community Conservation Area. The visit went on well the farmers from Katate learned many things. Mostly, the farmers from the two areas talked about being persistent in order to end the trend of charcoal making. Additionally, they discussed ways to engage more with the traditional leaders, as the traditional leaders can come up with laws on how to punish those found cutting trees for charcoal.

Farmers visiting the Community Conservation Area in Mwasemphangwe Chiefdom

COMACO intends to help more cooperatives organize additional farmer exchange visits, based on the success of this first visit.  

[/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][blockquote style=”left_border” font_size=”24px” color=”#9e9e9e” source=”Mr. Sam Munkombwe, COMACO Regional Coordinator”] “Katete used to face a lot of deforestation and land degradation. But through the coming of COMACO and working together with stakeholders like the Ministry of Agriculture, the Forestry Department, and the Ministry of Chiefs and Traditional Affairs, the individual farmers and their communities have learned about the importance of conservation, and how necessary their role is to achieve a green environment that will provide sustainable development to their chiefdoms.”[/blockquote]