Most did not believe that a company built and led from a foundation of poor, under-skilled farmers could possibly achieve a national food brand, much less turn back the tide of wildlife poaching and deforestation. That vision was nineteen years ago. The place was Zambia’s Luangwa Valley.

Today, most are believing and seeing how the brand It’s Wild! is harnessing the collective energy of over 230,000 small-scale farmers to restore soils and vitalize crops. Important soil nutrients that commercial fertilizers can’t provide without high costs are boosting yields and adding extra nutrition to our diet. They are also discovering how these farmers, scattered across landscapes where forests remain and often not far from wildlife, have become true conservation farmers, demonstrating that farming and conservation succeed better when they support each other. In the marketplace, consumers are choosing It’s Wild! for its quality, and are often willing to pay more once they learn how the brand helps farmers and nature thrive together.

Farmers too are discovering that they have a future in the marketplace by growing this story. In the past, farmers were tied to companies whose primary motive was simply profits for themselves. There was no story for conservation. COMACO has changed that by offering farmers far more profits when tied to environmental protection and has gone the extra step by inviting farmers a seat on its board to grow the business as true partners. To fill this seat, farmer cooperatives that COMACO helped to form, totalling 103 across 86 chiefdoms, established a federation to give a voice for their journey with COMACO and selected a chairperson to represent them.

As a business model COMACO continues to evolve. With each new step COMACO takes, we learn with growing

confidence and excitement that the path we are on is the right one. Farmers feel it too. They’ve seen their income rise, crops less threatened from climate and pests, and new market opportunities emerge from their effort to conserve.

If we are going to save our planet, small-scale farmers who till much of our available land area must be part of the solution. COMACO is giving us a solution that has the momentum to build a movement around a brand that started with poor farmers who now stand tall with the knowledge and the markets that conservation can bring. To learn more about COMACO visit www.staging.itswild.org.

COMACO works hard with close to 200,000 smallholder farmers to keep their soils naturally rich with minerals and organic compounds. Soils rich in natural nutrients helped by microbes in the soil produce plants that are able to withstand disease and sustain production better than plants in nutrient-poor soils.

We call this approach to farming, “farming with nature”, which includes such practices as zero tillage, crop residue retention, agroforestry, and crop rotation. As COMACO, we promote these and other nature-based ways for enhancing soil fertility through weekly radio programs broadcast in the local language, a widely disseminated, local language farming skills manual, and local trainers supporting year-round training needs of resident farmers.

By adopting the “farming with Nature” approach, small-scale farmers not only achieve improved yields, but they also lower their farming costs by minimizing or even eliminating the need for harmful chemicals that can find their way into the food chain. More importantly to the consumer, the shift to organic farming reduces risks of cancer and compromised immune systems that farm-based chemicals can sometimes cause. Equally important, as soils become restored with natural systems that perpetually replenish nutrients, farmers can stay put and farm the same plot year after year. In practice, this translates into the reduced need to clear forests for new farmland, and over time, Zambia’s watersheds and wildlife habitat become better protected.

For the farmer, the consumer and the environment, this is why COMACO produces only healthy food products. It sounds so simple and I wish it were! In reality, competing interests persuade farmers to grow certain crops with chemicals that slow down the transformation. Smallholder farmers are also cautious people and are reluctant to make changes and typically want to see a neighbor’s efforts first or to see the results from a small portion of their own before scaling.

The good news, though, is that we have a brand, It’s Wild!, that has a proven track record of giving good economic returns to farmers who commit to “farm with Nature”. We also have a growing number of consumers who trust us enough on delivering our health and conservation impact that they buy our products, not because they are the cheapest, but because they give us the full nutritional benefit straight from healthy soils that we help farmers maintain.

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/

The History of the Zambia Annual Quality Awards

The Ministry of Commerce, Trade and Industry is the custodian of the National Quality Policy in Zambia, which forms the backbone of all quality related matters in the country. The Ministry developed the National Quality Policy with the support of the United Nations Industrial Development (UNIDO)-Trade Capacity Building Project and was approved by Government in December 2010. Among the key policy objectives is to ensure that goods and services produced and supplied in Zambia meet local and international quality requirements. The Ministry of Commerce Trade and Industry in Zambia identified the need to establish the National Quality Awards programme in order to recognise and appreciation organisations and individuals who excel and are contributing to quality advancement in all sectors of Zambia.

Mr. David Sakala, Quality Assurance Manager at COMACO

“These awards tell a story of the behind-the-scenes work done by companies to ensure that the products that reach the consumers are safe.”

Mr. David Sakala, COMACO’s Quality Assurance Manager

The award programme was designed to motivate Zambian market operators to leverage high-quality standards to add value to their products, so as to better compete in the Zambian and international market.

Winners from the 2017 Zambia Annual Quality Awards

In order to recognise and appreciate organisations and companies who excel and are contributing to quality advancement in all sectors of Zambia, the annual awards were judged on the following criteria:

What does the company/organisation do to improve the quality of products, services and operations?

How does the company/organisation benefit from the improvement of the quality of products, services and operations?

What business opportunities are being created or expanded through the company/organisation’s quality efforts?

How does the company/organisation utilize quality in its activities for growing the business, and what quality control and customer feedback mechanisms does it have in place to improve quality?

Based on the above judgement criteria, COMACO was honoured to win a first place award in the 2017 Zambia Annual Quality Awards, alongside many of Zambia’s most highly regarded companies and organisation, as listed below:

[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner css=”.vc_custom_1454240731978{padding-left: 60px !important;}”][list_style color=”#4caf50″]

• COMACO: Company of the Year (Small/Medium Enterprise)
• Global Industries: Company of the Year (Large Enterprise)
• Mosi (Zambian Breweries): Product of the Year (Large Enterprise) 
• Luano Honey: Product of the Year (Small/Medium Enterprise)
• Varun Beverages Limited: Exporter of the year (Large Enterprise)
• NAPSA: Service of the Year (Large Enterprise)
• Spruceland Tech: Service of the Year (Small/Medium Enterprise)
• Mike Sichula (Radio Phoenix): Individual Award for Media Publicist of the Year

Additionally, COMACO was awarded 3rd place prize for Best Product of the Year for our It’s Wild! Peanut Butter.[/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][blockquote style=”left_border” font_size=”24px” color=”#9e9e9e” source=”Mr. David Sakala, COMACO’s Quality Assurance Manager”]

“COMACO produces products that are consumed by a large population, both in Zambia and selected parts of other countries. The company works hard to ensure the safety of all the consumers of our products and meets all the legislations and regulations of both national and international bodies. By following high standard of quality we have gained customer confidence, regulators approval, and the consumer’s loyalty. We have managed to position ourselves strategically on the market as a result of our quality.”[/blockquote][vc_column_text]

COMACO is committed to exceeding quality standards in all aspects of our work. As the application process for the 2018  Zambia Annual Quality Awards draws closer, COMACO is looking forward to once again participating in these important awards.

[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”3/3″][blockquote font_size=”18px” color=”#4caf50″ source=”Mr. David Sakala, COMACO’s Quality Assurance Manager”]“By means of these award, the companies that have invested and implemented systems that ensure that high standard of quality are followed, are recognised. Such recognition is a motivation for companies to better improve their systems. The result is that the customer is a beneficially. Awareness of companies that win such awards should ultimately lead more consumers loyalty and more sales of Zambian-made products.”[/blockquote][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_column_text]

To learn more about COMACO’s award-winner It’s Wild! products, please click here.