I reached in my pocket and passed him a K20 (about $1.04) through the window just as the light turned green and I drove away.   After a few minutes more driving toward home I confessed to myself: I could easily have given him a K100 and should have.  He needed the money more than I. It was selfish of me.

I started to imagine the life that little boy lived.  How many nights did he go to bed hungry?  Did he go to school?  Were his parents still alive or simply too poor to care for him?  I knew he was not alone.  I see many standing along the streets, sometimes early in the morning as if they have woken from some secret place to begin another day of begging.

COMACO works with close to 200,000 small-scale farmers to manufacture surplus food crops into healthy, nutritious products and distribute them to retail stores all over the country. It struck me that the reality, however, is that few of these products, which we produce from surplus after the farmers have fed their own families, reach others truly hungry and malnourished people.  The products on retail shelves tend to be expensive, and these stores are too far away from where poverty and hunger grind away in Zambia’s towns and cities. While revenue from those products helps fund our food and conservation initiatives with rural poor and provides nutritious local foods to middle and upper-class urban consumers, our system does not serve the urban poor very well.

The chance encounter with that boy got me thinking, and soon a discussion spread among our staff.  We might not be able to feed every street kid, but we could at least try to get our nutritious and tasty products to more of the urban poor at prices they can afford.

With a determined staff and deep convictions, COMACO is now launching a new business model that links our farmers directly to low-income consumers in this way, offering the same quality products but making them significantly cheaper and more available to these populations.  By modifying our packaging, initiating direct sales through tiny neighborhood shops, and using new mobile apps for quality control, we’ll be able to lower the price by as much as 20%. This will give It’s Wild! products a reach we’ve never had before. Our new “Green Market Shops” will wholesale directly to the small shops where low-income consumers in need can easily find our products at affordable prices.

It’s a Zambian farmer-to-consumer solution, and a viable business model with soul. It also further supports our success regenerating soils and restoring forests in ways that both nourish the hungry and keep the environment healthy.  In ways like this, COMACO keeps trying to get it right.  If there had not been that red light and young boy in Lusaka, we might have missed this chance to do it better.

For helping us get our new model off the ground, I wish to thank the Zambia Bureau of Standards for allowing our innovations to reduce product costs, Partners in Food Solution for helping us develop new nutrient-rich products, and especially the Green Innovation Centres for the Agriculture and Food Sector (GIC) for supporting our efforts to scale our Green Market Shops.

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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/

It took time and research for COMACO to figure things out, but today we see a better story unfolding. Farmers have learned that composting and intercropping legumes or growing them in rotation with maize boosts crop yields. In addition,  planting crops in-between rows of nitrogen-fixing trees positively impacts the economics for small-scale farming communities. 

Using this approach, farmers can reduce the majority of the costs associated with expensive chemical inputs. Instead, they use a nitrogen-fixing tree called Gliricidia sepium that helps return soil health and is also a sustainable source of wood-fuel for cooking and heating needs. Today’s conscious consumer is looking for healthier food products, and with the right partners, we can provide market opportunities that reward rural farmers for making the shift sustainable agriculture methods.

One of the key roles we play in this value-chain is processing the pesticide-free crops from small-scale farmers into high-value food products sold under the It’s Wild! brand. We also provide access to commodity markets that pay top prices for crops grown without chemicals. COMACO also helps rural farming communities through their cooperatives to produce certified seeds which they sell at a reduced cost to its members. Community seed-banking also guarantees they can select high-yielding seeds that are GMO-free and bring essential market value to small-scale farmers

Meanwhile, what has happened to all those poachers?  Many have found a better life as COMACO farmers, gaining a sustainable and legal means of income generation plus food security.  Today, COMACO has over 186,000 registered farmers. Among these farmers, 1,653 were once poachers but have now surrendered their guns to learn sustainable farming methods. The added benefit is that they are assured a ready market by COMACO.

Zambia now has a way to turn crops into the answer to stopping elephant poaching!  It may sound far-fetched but speak to any rural farmer and they will tell you that the COMACO model makes conservation pays. No longer are unsustainable practices that destroy their natural resources needed.  It’s not sustainable. Ask the consumers, and more likely than not, they will say that It’s Wild! products are worth the purchase because they’re an organic food brand rooted in conservation and enhances food security for rural communities, number 2 of the SDG goals.

The 4th Congress Hidden Hunger brings together members of different disciplines: nutritionists, agricultural scientists, economists and sociologists. Moreover, the Congress will encourage the dialogue between scientists, policy-makers and representatives of non-governmental organizations and the private sector. It is dedicated to review the available evidence on the double burden of malnutrition, present new research findings on underlying causes and consequences, feature innovative strategies and discuss the roles and responsibilities of governments, development organizations, civil society and the private sector in combating the double burden of malnutrition.

COMACO has been involved with community-based conservation in the Luangwa Valley for the last 15 years, and in partnership with organizations such as Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), collaborators in local government and other committed partner organizations and donors, COMACO is able to continue working with rural communities to help them increase their food security. When we increase food security, it boosts their self-sufficiency to generate community-level income without endangering local wildlife and other natural resources by using climate-smart, sustainable agriculture methods.

As a result, interest in climate-smart agriculture with a minimum of soil tillage is gaining ground, and Zambia is at the forefront of Africa’s smallholders in this respect.

In adopting sustainable farming methods, smallholder farmers are less likely to resort to harmful practices that lead to deforestation caused by the production of charcoal, clearing of new land for agriculture and illegal logging.

COMACO’s programs also provide smallholder farmers with various market incentives, some of which are tied to the sale of our It’s Wild! food products – a popular food brand in Zambia.