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COMACO: Community Markets for Conservation, Lusaka, Zambia
Sustainable Food Security, Wildlife Conservation, & Ecosystem Preservation in Zambia Africa
COMACO is a non-profit organization that reduces human hunger and poverty while saving wildlife and helping to preserve the ecosystems they inhabit. Silent Heroes Foundation will work to provide veterinary supplies for their community poultry & goat projects. COMACO is working to develop a market for village chickens in Lusaka to give small-scale farmers an extra incentive to stop cutting down trees in order to make charcoal. This is a large-scale initiative, providing 1000-2000 birds per month as food for the local community, with the capacity to grow even larger based on a heavy demand for supply. In specific areas where there is minimal risk of geographic overlap between goats and wildlife, COMACO seeks to improve goat husbandry and market support for goats to promote alternative meat sources to wildlife as well as alternative income sources to poaching.
For villagers in the rural Luangwa Valley, protein is hard to come by. Growing a more diversified array of crops to include soya and ground nuts certainly helps, but it’s the desire for meat protein that drives villagers into the bush to hunt for game meat. Most villagers can’t afford cattle, which are also attractive to dangerous predators and prohibited in many parts of the Game Management Areas. Poultry and goats represent small, affordable, sustainable protein sources that can be managed on little in the way of expensive feed, and without extensive overgrazing.
Small-scale poultry keeping is an important component of rural Zambian life. Poultry are a source of animal protein, a source of family income and serve functions within the traditional culture. Rural Zambians living around the Luangwa Valley typically keep between 10-15 free-range chickens for these purposes. However, poultry-keeping has not been a dependable source of food and income due to diseases that can eradicate entire flocks. Improvement of poultry production would result in increased food security, thereby decreasing reliance on poaching and other harmful practices. Villagers could also possibly sell excess animals and eggs through the COMACO system.
Research done in 2006 showed that infectious diseases such as fowl pox, salmonellosis, fowl cholera, and Newcastle disease; external and internal parasites; predation from wildcats, snakes, birds, etc; and a lack of knowledge of proper husbandry techniques were all significantly reducing the productivity of poultry raising in South Luangwa. Of these, Newcastle Disease was determined to be a major cause of the high poultry mortality experienced yearly from October-December.
Based on these observations, COMACO began a program of Newcastle vaccination, in which vaccines are made available at local depots. Field days and extension officers teach the value of vaccination along with other aspects of good husbandry practices.
COMACO seeks to help hunters become model goat producers to fully benefit from these markets and reduce community tendencies to exploit wildlife as a basis for poverty reduction. These efforts will also target other households who have adopted charcoal-making to reduce this destructive land use practice of tree-clearing. One bag of charcoal earns a producer approximately $1.20 at considerable cost of labor and environmental damage to watershed and wildlife production.
COMACO is stewarded by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and works in close consultation with key agencies such as the Community Resources Boards of Luangwa Valley, Producer Group Cooperatives, District Council authorities, and key Government institutions such as the Zambia Wildlife Authority and Ministries of Tourism, Environment and Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Local Government. COMACO draws from a wide range of other collaborating partners to provide technical support for its holistic, integrated approach to rural development and conservation. Some of the partners include General Mills, Mogul Enterprises of South Africa, Cornell University, Haas Business School of Berkeley University and Conservation Farming Union of Zambia.
Rural people benefit from this company by joining a COMACO-registered producer group, which requires group members to learn improved farming skills and adopt by-laws that refrain group members from using snares or other practices destructive to their natural resources. COMACO facilitates the formation of Producer Group Cooperatives among the different producer groups for each COMACO trading depot. Producer group members are entitled to improved producer prices and producer bonus prices for complying to their by-laws and other conditions the company may set forth to help improve food security and environmental management.
To learn more about COMACO, please visit www.itswild.org.
