Written by Nick Schonfeld
Smoke Phiri looks like an archetypal henchman. His massive frame towers over his family of nine children. At 50 years old, he seems to have lost none of his strength or virility. As he talks, he gestures confidently with large calloused hands. Smoke is, frankly, a little intimidating. And that’s not surprising, because for two decades, Smoke was a prolific poacher.
Photographer Julia Gunther and I met Smoke while on an IFAW/COMACO project visit to Chikomeni and Mwasemphangwe chiefdoms in eastern Zambia, which form part of the Malawi-Zambia Trans frontier Conservation Area (TFCA). Mostly aimed at female farmers and poachers, the project is a new partnership, started in 2021, between IFAW and COMACO, and is funded by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ).
As is often the case with multi-partner projects, the name is a bit of a mouthful: “Enhancing Climate Resilience and Cross Border Collaborations in Kasungu/Lukusuzi Trans-frontier Conservation Area (TFCA)”. But its goals are both ambitious and very necessary.
Populated mainly by small-scale, low-income farmers, Chikomeni and Mwasemphangwe chiefdoms are squeezed in between Lukusuzi National Park on the left and Kasungu National Park in Malawi on the right. The two chiefdoms are part of a wildlife corridor between the unfenced parks across which buffalo, hyenas, elephants and countless other species travel up and down throughout the year.
Chronic food insecurity, driven by worsening climate change and the absence of a market for farmers to sell their crops, has forced many into poaching or illegal mining. Those who choose not to, struggle to feed their families for large parts of the year. Add to that the fact that most nights wild animals wander through the farms on their way to or from Kasungu or Lukusuzi, and that farms offer an irresistible supply of food for wildlife, and you have all the ingredients for a classic human-wildlife conflict that makes it very difficult for communities to live in harmony with nature.
Every farm we visited had a corral made of sturdy logs and branches where villagers kept their cattle during the night. Goats were housed on raised platforms and in some places, harvested crops were stored off the ground on drying racks. If left unprotected, jackals or hyenas would cause havoc.
It’s no surprise that the TFCA was a prime hunting ground for poachers like Smoke, who told me he used to kill one or two elephants a week, as well as buffalos, kudu and warthogs. He would sell the ivory as quickly as he could. The bush meat would be eaten or sold at local markets. But that was almost twenty years ago. Smoke stopped poaching in 2003. The reason Smoke stopped is why we are here talking with him in front of his red brick house, surrounded by the fields of sunflowers, soya beans and groundnuts he now grows.
Former poacher Smoke Phiri stands in his maize field in Mwase Mphangwe, Zambia. Photo: Julia Gunther / © IFAW
When I talked to Smoke, and to the other farmers and former poachers we spent time with, they all said the same thing. For people to change, they need a viable alternative. Telling someone to stop poaching when it’s their only source of income, does not work. Lecturing farmers on their destructive farming practices if you don’t show them how to do things differently, does not work. And I can tell you, that after travelling through this remote part of Zambia, where there are precious few markets, where roads are impassable during the rainy season, and where most people run out of food months before they can harvest their next crop, it really is that simple.
This is why COMACO’s approach has been so incredibly effective. If farmers don’t know how to work their land in ways that increases the fertility of the soil, then show them how. If farmers cannot sell their crops because of a lack of access to markets, then create that market.
COMACO retrained Smoke to become a farmer; something he had no experience in – he’d been a poacher since the age of 13. It worked. After being taught new livelihood skills including vegetable gardening, beekeeping, carpentry, poultry and conservation farming, Smoke traded in his .375 rifle and shotgun for a hoe and a few bags of seed, and returned to his home village to start planting. He had undergone a remarkable transformation: from a destructive force to a steward of this important landscape.
Although Smoke is perhaps one of the more dramatic examples of transformation, COMACO doesn’t just focus on poachers. In fact, most of the people they’ve worked with for the past 19 years are traditional farmers who they’ve retrained in smart agricultural techniques; methods, which improve both crop yields and the environment without the use of chemicals or fertilisers.
Carrying a pile of harvested soya beans on her head, Grace Mtonga returns to her family village in Chikomeni, Zambia. Photo: Julia Gunther / © IFAW
Everywhere we went, the farmers were keen to tell me what they had learnt. How to till the land as little as possible by using a ripper instead of building ridges, how to use organic material such as leaves or branches as fertiliser, how to plant nitrogen-fixing trees like Gliricidia sepium, and that keeping groundnuts (peanuts) in their shells is a great way to avoid the spread of aflatoxin- a poisonous fungus that if consumed can lead to serious illness or death. These were simple and affordable solutions that helped increase the quality and quantity of the crops they could grow.
After COMACO buys Smoke’s crops at an above the market price, they ship them to their massive factory in Lundazi, the capital of Lundazi district, along with the harvests of thousands of other farmers. On a tour of the plant, we saw warehouses filled with thousands of tons of rice, groundnuts, maize, soya and beans.
There’s a quality control laboratory and a department that develops new products. At one of several milling stations, we met workers who were rushing to finish a 300-ton order of maize and soya porridge mix for Mary’s Meals, an international non-governmental organisation that runs school feeding programs. With 150 tons per month, COMACO is now Zambia’s largest producer of peanut butter. Dozens of COMACO’s It’s Wild! products line the shelves of supermarkets across Zambia. The scale of it all is impressive.
The positive impact of all these transformations is immediately clear. Thanks to projects like this one, small-scale farmers can earn a living, growing nutritious, chemical-free, high-value crops that provide them with income and food security, while learning how to help care for the land and environment they use.
The project, of course, has its challenges. The catchment area is enormous and many of the farmers live in remote villages. And, as with any community project, you never get one hundred percent of people to fully commit. But when you look at everything that this project has solved, any remaining issues seem trivial. The benefits are obvious to most. I think that is because many participating farmers share their experiences with others and help recruit new candidates. Many of COMACO’s fieldworkers are farmers themselves, a key element in building the trust you need when implementing a project of this kind.
Smoke is chair of the Transformed Poachers Association and travels to Lundazi prison to coach incarcerated poachers. The other two former poachers we spoke to, Ronald Mwale and Edison Mphande Phiri (he is not related to Smoke) seemed to be extremely happy to have stopped. Not only do they make more money as farmers, but growing crops is also a lot safer. On the last poaching trip he ever organised, Ronald and four fellow hunters ran into a ranger patrol. During the ensuing firefight, all four of his companions were killed.
Elita Mwale and her family harvest peanuts on their farm in Chikomeni, Zambia. Photo: Julia Gunther / © IFAW
Elita Mwale, a female farmer with seven children, proudly showed us her new house, her ripper, her two oxen, her ox cart and the shop she was building on land she had bought – all paid for with the money she made by selling her crops to COMACO.
Last year, in 2021, the start of the rains was delayed. Fainess Mgulude could not harvest her crops until later in the season. In previous years, a delayed harvest would have been catastrophic for Fainess, a widow with five children. But since she started using the methods she learnt from COMACO, she has not run out of food once. The delay in rains no longer impacts her as she has enough to last her through the entire year.
There are plenty more examples. You can see the change everywhere in the TFCA. From elephants to sunflowers, from rammed earth to iron sheets, from ridges to ripping, from hunger to surplus, from outlaw to advocate.
But I write about Smoke, Ronald, Edison, Fainess and Elita not for effect or emphasis. I write about them because they deserve to be recognised for the transformation they went through. Because for them, and the many thousands of others whose existence depends entirely on their relationship with the natural world around them, it’s a game-changer.
]]>They are part of a project to improve the income of communities and individual farmers, by training them to farm high-value crops like groundnuts, soybeans and cowpeas and reducing reliance on poaching for bush meat or for profit.
The project targets 3,500 mostly female farmers—1,000 in Malawi and 2,500 in Zambia—across a 32,278 km² part of the Malawi-Zambia Trans frontier Conservation Area (TFCA). The area includes extensive communal lands as well as three national parks, Lukusuzi and Luambe in Zambia and Kasungu in Malawi.
A partnership between the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO) and funded by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), has begun recruiting and training 30 local leaders in the TFCA who will, in turn, each train and monitor 83 farmers. Others will learn to identify products such as mushrooms and caterpillars to sell for income and to prevent illegal activities such as poaching and cutting down trees for charcoal.
“Climate change is negatively affecting small-scale farmers in the Lukusuzi/Kasungu TFCA landscape in Zambia and Malawi leading to a loss of income. This can lead to people engaging in poaching of wildlife for subsistence or profit,” said Neil Greenwood, IFAW Regional Director Southern Africa.
“IFAW believes people and animals thrive together. By supporting climate-smart livelihoods in communities in the TFCA, we can improve incomes and protect wildlife from the threat of poaching.”
“The focus of the project is finding practical, cost-effective solutions to the growing challenges of climate change that small-scale, poor farmers face today. It expands on COMACO’s current range of works with 230,000 farmers by identifying 3,500 vulnerable households encompassing mainly women and youth and supporting them with multiple livelihood skills for increased income and food security,” said Dale Lewis, CEO and Founder of COMACO.
Following entirely organic principles COMACO trains farmers in organic principles that includes planting legumes to improve soil nutrition, and to practice crop rotation to keep fields healthy.
Crops are planted alongside Gliricidia sepium trees, which provide additional nutrition to soil and are a natural pest repellent.
“COMACO planted 60 million trees for the 2021-2022 season. Our plan is also to plant 1.75 million trees under this project—500 agroforestry seedlings per 0.25 hectares of farmlands per farmer,” said Dale Lewis.
COMACO will also distribute 1,000 Better Life books to local schools and farmer producer groups in Zambia and Malawi. The book is a local language training manual with colour-printed visual aids covering topics on sustainable agriculture, crop, and agroforestry management.
- COMACO is the sole author and the views expressed are COMACO’s and not those of GIZ.
- “Enhancing Climate Resilience and Cross Border Collaborations in Kasungu/Lukusuzi Trans-frontier Conservation Area (TFCA)” is a project of IFAW and COMACO supported and funded by GIZ.
About the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW)
The International Fund for Animal Welfare is a global non-profit helping animals and people thrive together. We are experts and everyday people, working across seas, oceans and in more than 40 countries around the world. We rescue, rehabilitate and release animals, and we restore and protect their natural habitats. The problems we’re up against are urgent and complicated. To solve them, we match fresh thinking with bold action. We partner with local communities, governments, non-governmental organisations, and businesses. Together, we pioneer new and innovative ways to help all species flourish.
See how at ifaw.org
About the Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO)
The Community Markets for Conservation is a social enterprise that reaches more than 230,000 small-scale farmers in Zambia, 1,800 of whom are reformed poachers, to adopt farming practices that keep soils healthy and forests less threatened by the need to clear trees to create more farmland. It is from these farmers that we pay premium market prices for their crops to manufacture 20 nutritious and high value food products under the brand It’s wild!
See more at staging.itswild.org
Press contact
George Sichinga
COMACO Communications Manager
m: +260 966 494 292
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I pulled up to a fuel station recently and began chatting with the attendant whose name was Eddie. I asked where he was originally from and his reply was Katete.
“I know Katete well,” I said. “It is one of the areas where COMACO works. Why did you leave?”
“The soil is dead,” was his reply. “No nutrients. Fertilizers are too expensive for a poor farmer like me and without it, I could not produce enough to support my family, so I came to Lusaka to find work,” Eddie is one of the lucky ones. He found a job, though one that keeps him standing and breathing diesel fumes all day.
Eddie is not alone. Many have abandoned a life of farming to face a hard and uncertain future in the city. Not all shift to urban centers, however. Many farmers clear nearby forests to access fertile soils. Some move further and find themselves in conflict with wildlife near one of Zambia’s national parks. In desperation, some resort to poaching, and a valued resource slowly diminishes.
People, wildlife, forests, and ultimately the entire country, suffer when farming practices do not restore and recycle nutrients in the soil. We know that continued use of chemical fertilizers is not the answer and can damage soils. With so much knowledge about how to keep soils healthy by adopting more natural, lower-cost farming practices, why haven’t more farmers adopted them?
Perhaps the answer is that it takes a committed partner to make the investment to help farmers adopt the right practices and provide the market incentives for staying committed to them. Such partners seem rare in Zambia.
COMACO is playing that role with its 17 years of lessons and know-how. Unfortunately, it did not come soon enough in Katete to help Eddie, I explained to him how our farming system works without fertilizer and how market prices supported by our It’s Wild! brand gives farmers a better life by staying sedentary, managing soil health, improve crop yields, and increase their income.
Eddie listened forlornly, realizing perhaps the better life he had wanted for his family and sacrificed to pump fuel instead was now gone forever. I encouraged him to go back and join a COMACO cooperative. As I drove off leaving him in my rear-view mirror, I wondered what quality of life Eddie would lead.
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When cooperative members in Nsefu, Kazembe and Chitungulu chiefdoms had their maize and rice fields swept away by floods this past year, cooperatives from multiple chiefdoms on the plateau answered their call with sweet potato vines and cassava cuttings to ensure afflicted families would have food. Over 500 households benefited from this gesture of goodwill from the cooperatives to boost their threatened food security.
Other cooperatives have promised to provide bean seeds once harvested to counter risks of hunger following this natural disaster. Increasingly, cooperatives across Luangwa Valley are recognizing that cooperation and not competition will build a better future of everyone.”
What is driving this?
Partly the traditional values of helping and sharing are reemerging as cooperatives build a path toward self-reliance with new farming technologies and markets that COMACO is helping to support. As COMACO, we see a growing cooperative spirit of achieving more when cooperatives work together to overcome common challenges.
[bctt tweet=”One very common challenge is the destruction and loss of natural resources when communities do not plan or encourage better practices.” username=”COMACO_Zambia”] Such threats occur beyond cooperative boundaries and need a shared responsibility so such pressures can be contained and future economies developed.
COMACO’s radio program called Farm Talk and the increasing use of SMS messaging supported by COMACO are giving cooperatives a platform to communicate solutions and growing solidarity for linking conservation with development. [bctt tweet=”Tolerance to poaching and charcoal-making is waning and community pride in setting aside protected forests and enforcing environmental regulations is growing. #COMACOWorks #ForestConservation” username=”COMACO_Zambia”]
Where all this leads is a good question. It is probably not a quest to make lots of money because small-scale farming will not make you rich. For this pursuit, try your luck in the city with a skill that an advanced education can provide. But if it is life that offers free water to drink, free sustainable fuelwood for cooking, clean air, healthy foods you grow yourself, and having better markets to meet basic needs with ample time to enjoy friends and family, then it is easy to see why a life as a cooperative member would be preferred.
COMACO cooperatives have a ways to go as they build financial independence for supporting the needs of their members. Annual accounts need to be audited, annual general meetings require full attendance to build transparency and accountability of their leaders, and of course, good environmental governance is essential. These are the building blocks that will give COMACO farmers a real crack at making markets and conservation work together for a better life and a long-term commitment to the resources they live with.
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