Community Markets for Conservation

As a conservation scientist, I led a team 21 years ago to examine how small-scale farmers could produce more food and cause less damage to their land through low-impact, non-chemical farming.  Technical results showed promise but adoption was low. Lacking were any incentives from markets to the farmers.

I procured rice from 300 farmers, the start of what is now an 188,000-farmer enterprise called COMACO. We convert over 12,000 tons of food surplus (after local farmers feed their own families) into 17 value-added products under the brand name It’s Wild! Farming families have more food, more income and a safer relationship with their environment, while supplying nutritious foods to over 2 million Zambians (with proposed near-term actions that could raise this to 4.5 million).  

Still a conservation scientist, I lead COMACO’s team of 264 staff as CEO, helping build an approach that transforms marginalized communities and restores wildlife and forests.

Africa is losing its plant and animal biodiversity, with incalculable costs to current and future generations. This is caused in part by small-scale farmers who grow unsustainable crops, over-rely on chemicals, and till the land in harmful ways. This locks families into malnutrition and poverty, and drives problems like deforestation and elephant poaching. Radical change is needed.

The approach we’ve developed and are trying to expand transforms communities by linking thousands of small-scale farmers directly with food consumers (in urban markets), carbon sequestration (in global markets), and elephant conservation. By creating these markets, we incentivize more nutritious and more resilient food chains with higher income and environmental vitality. Seeing the benefits, farmers organize themselves into cooperatives for further community action.  Our results illustrate and elevate how marginalized communities can help resolve food insecurity, malnutrition, biodiversity loss, climate change, and cultural threats – all at the same time, at large scale.

Rural communities across much of Africa and elsewhere are beholden to external market forces that usually seek short-term profits while ignoring longer-term human and environmental costs. These costs are insidious, undeniable, and devastating for poor farmers and communities, and they are made worse with the rising specter of climate change.

Without sustainable farming skills and incentives to use them, poor farmers unwittingly degrade their soils and suffer declining yields and income.  Even chemical fertilizers are out of reach for most, driving deforestation as farmers clear forests in search of fertile soils.  Many simply give up and migrate to cities, where uncertain life awaits. Those who remain often exploit and extract local natural resources even further to make ends meet.  Such trends accelerate local and country-level risks of food insecurity and diminished biodiversity. Issues like the COVID pandemic and climate change multiply the risks. What is missing are big incentives for conservation that can turn small farmers into the solution (for themselves and others), rather than the problem. The private sector has generally failed in keeping land productive, foods healthy, and landscapes and communities resilient. Instead, status quo markets by-pass the needs of small-scale farmers and the environment for short-term gains.

Our solution creates several market incentives, at large scale, that reward small-scale farmers for stewarding the health of their fields and  surrounding environment. 

 We are a company, including staff and community cooperatives, that manufactures food products under the brand It’s Wild! Our products are derived exclusively from commodities supplied by small-scale farmers. To participate, farmers pledge to (1) adopt farming practices that restore nutrients to soils without relying on chemical inputs, (2) abandon practices that threaten forests and wildlife, and (3) focus on food for their families before selling surplus to the company. In return, we invest in education, warehouses, trucks, value-added processing, and market development. We have grown to include 17 It’s Wild! food products and 81 cooperatives, with 188,000 total members now following the conservation pledge.  

We sacrifice some potential profit by paying top prices, and an annual conservation dividend to cooperatives to incentivize their conservation pledge. This leads to land and forest regeneration, including harvesting additional commodities like honey and mushrooms, as well as wildlife conservation that provides ecological, cultural, and financial benefits. This also enables us to document and sell carbon sequestration in global climate markets, which helps fund the conservation dividends to farmers.

Poor, rural, small-scale farming families are the heart and soul of COMACO’s mission.  We bring hope and purpose to their lives. We do this through bottom-up training and organizing farmers into self-run cooperatives. The farmers become the leaders and, with skills and markets COMACO provides, they solve many of their own problems. This has helped bring social and environmental change to 188,000 smallholders so far (including 52% women).

In addition, COMACO’s commercial value chains feed over 2 million urban consumers through supermarkets and schools, and we’re piloting a strategy for expanding substantially into smaller neighborhood stores also. This revenue (approximately $2.2 million in 2019) contributes to the costs of running the company and the cooperatives.

Our project also serves elephants and other wildlife that are no longer being poached in high numbers in the region. Keeping our relationship with farmers fair and transparent requires a never-ending dialogue to appreciate each other’s needs and contributions. We use weekly, year-round radio broadcasts to over 1million listeners and over 550 skilled local farmer-trainers equipped with smartphones to advance the listening and knowledge sharing process. This creates mutual respect and keeps COMACO grounded in farmer realities and needs.

COMACO succeeds because we incentivize 188,000 marginalized people to steward natural ecosystems and soils. We create value with them: less hunger, financial income, improved health through nutrition and peace, resilient landscapes, biodiversity, education, and embrace of local culture. We monetize these combined values by selling tons of nutritious foods in urban markets, carbon sequestration in global climate markets, and elephant conservation. All are necessary for our financial viability, and all depend on actions combining health, environment, food and economy. We elevate the power of this cross-sectoral overlap, and we elevate the role of marginalized people in propelling big unconventional solutions.

Four revelations emerged from my work in the early 2000’s that questioned assumptions about conservation and framed the beginning of COMACO: 1) wildlife poachers were poor, unskilled farmers who could not feed their families and sought illegal markets to make ends meet, 2) traders typically exploited these farmers by buying grain early when farmers were poorest and kept them poor by buying at far below market value, 3) most subsistence farmers ran out of food before the next harvest, and 4) cotton companies used small-scale farmers as cheap labor to profit themselves.

I had a small staff of 5 Zambians at the time and we presented these results to community leaders on a Saturday morning in a town called Lundazi.  The ensuing discussions, which led to an agreement expressed in their own words, gave birth to COMACO: “Rather than law enforcement, which has failed, provide us better markets and skills for better alternatives and we will stop our destructive practices”. 

That meeting has since defined a partnership with a growing number of communities that has added many layers of wisdom how conservation can work with farmers.  We called this partnership “Community Markets for Conservation” that became a fully registered company.

As a wildlife conservationist in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley living in remote communal areas where wildlife and farmers meet, I had many experiences that exposed me to the hardships of local hunger and family tragedies that often come when help is never there.  Year after year I witnessed the struggles farmers face and their strength of survival for the families they loved.  It was a humbling experience that drew me close to Zambia and its people. 

I also witnessed during these times obscene amounts of donor assistance squandered with ill-conceived strategies to address rural poverty and private sector greed that maintained social and economic disparities, often at the expense of local natural resources.  I could not turn my back on what I saw.  Few seemed willing to recognize them, much less prepared to tackle them.

Underlying these experiences were many long days following behind elephants with the awe and wonder of someone who knew conservation would be my calling but honest enough to admit I did not understand how to make it work.  Perhaps because of my affinity to farmers, I could see the problems through their eyes, and the passion to use my skills to find solutions we need today.

I have spent years in the Luangwa Valley where COMACO started, figuring out how to solve the complex challenges of linking solutions to rural poverty to conservation. In the end the answer is remarkably straightforward: drive market incentives that make it profitable for small-scale farmers to steward their land sustainably and help organize farmers respond collectively to this opportunity. But it is also an unconventional business model, subject to dismissal by many corporate or political interests who do not see smallholder farming as impactful or scalable.

Getting to this point has involved a great deal of hard work and set-backs across a landscape characterized by large-scale food insecurity, wildlife poaching, and encroachment of industrial cash crops that accelerated rather than relieved cycles of poverty and environmental degradation. Despite such hurdles, lessons were learned that have led us to where we are today.

We now see great opportunity to spread the COMACO approach. This includes growing urban food markets to include small retailers (corner stores) with 1.2 million more consumers, and replicating the COMACO farmer/producer approach for the first time ever, in an entirely new region where poverty and environmental degradation is also rampant (600 miles south of Luangwa Valley).

In Zambia, no one else offers this combination of insights, infrastructure, market relationships, staff, and mission. We’re also told our approach is rare in the world. COMACO’s actions and principles are now recognized by groups like Ashoka, the Harvard Kennedy School, the international Nourishment Economies Coalition, Navajo community organizers and others.

After struggling to raise finance in COMACO’s early years, I contracted a South African company to build a major structure to house two large processing lines.  Unknown to me, the contractor fraudulently cut costs on the building materials, which caused the entire structure to collapse.  Since we had already paid for the building, my team knew that the disaster could break the company and end all of our dreams. 

The contractor fabricated evidence to deflect the blame and refused to take responsibility.  I told my staff I would not turn my back on them or COMACO and promised I would fight this battle all the way.  Lacking finances to hire legal help, I spent the next 5 weeks gathering evidence on my own.

When I was ready, though anxious and scared, I arranged for a meeting.     I used tactics of persuasion that surprised their team, our team, and even myself.  My final argument offered two choices:  complete the building we’ve paid for or meet me in court and never have a license to build again in Zambia. They blinked, we won, and we discovered the power of never giving up and being ready to fight when the cause is right.

I am often asked how I found such great staff, and how I get them to work so hard.  I am particularly proud of building the COMACO team.  It is my passion to give staff the support and freedom they need to reach their personal goals, and to ensure they receive the credit and recognition they deserve.  I believe there are amazing talents waiting to be unlocked in most people and I truly enjoy helping unlock those talents for everyone on my team.

Richard Mumba, for example, joined as a junior procurement officer 12 years ago, and today he is my deputy, overseeing all of our farmer extension and crop buying activities.  Early in his career Richard could not punctuate a sentence and when speaking in public his repetitious wordiness would drag out his talk and lose his audience, but his love of work and persistence to improve did not escape me.  He, like many others I’ve mentored, rose up in the ranks.  Today, he writes compelling proposals and often gets an applause when speaking about COMACO.     Multiply Richard by 30 other Zambians, and that is how we’ve built the great team for achieving COMACO’s mission.

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COMACO has achieved what few others have: an ecosystem-scale, bottom-up, and market-based approach that unifies conservation and food production systems into a singular mission-driven model.  Also unique, is its foundation of 17 years that has given it the opportunity to learn how to engage communities as the ultimate drivers and beneficiaries of the model.  As a result, we have a well-tested model for demonstrating how communities can restore land and biodiversity while improving their well-being through markets that reward good farming and land use practices.   

This puts solutions to rural poverty and land degradation, and the processes to achieve them, into the hands of farming communities rather than the ephemeral whims of donors and international NGOs.  This realignment of roles through the COMACO model offers a much better return for donor investment with multiple downstream benefits: nutrition, food security, conservation, education, financial inclusiveness, environmental governance, peace and respect for local culture and value.  Such realignment also has the potential for transforming how producers through an alliance of cooperatives can serve consumers with healthier, more affordable nutrition by developing more direct value-chains to customers with a back-flow of incentives to maintain environmental compliance.  

If COMACO’s brand, It’s Wild!, can win in the marketplace, consumers will be sending a message to other brands to be more environmentally and socially responsible. For Africa, this is critically important as markets become increasingly open to foreign brands and external interests.  COMACO represents Africa’s interests and a story to propel similar interests around the world.

Our work harnesses the power of small-scale farming communities to restore land and biodiversity.  Using market-driven solutions, our approach also enables these communities to meet food and nutritional needs for those who need it the most.  As a general model for countries where rural poverty and limited education threaten livelihoods and environment, the COMACO experience has global importance. 

The process is incremental, progressively building cohesion for conservation among hundreds of thousands of farmers that lead to the collective ownership of a social enterprise.  We have not reached this outcome yet but we are on track, demonstrating how communities can bind and represent large-scale solutions for conservation, nutrition, health, knowledge, culture and peace.   We see this being achieved through the current COMACO enterprise linked to multiple landscapes with ownership shares in different value chains held by farmer cooperatives that drive value from and for conservation, not for the sake of profit but for the inclusive well-being of communities who live with Nature. 

Our unit of change starts with poor farmers, and our delivery system is a combination of cost-effective training, assistance with needed inputs, and incentives to drive adoption of low-impact farming skills that sustain commodity volumes to support commercial value-chains.  As farming communities transcend this initial stage, civic leaders emerge and see opportunities for a better future if farmers can unite and build this future together. We help this process through the next step that leads to formation of multi-purpose farmer cooperatives.   

As cooperatives respond to market incentives that shape commitment to environmental governance and inclusiveness, the real magic of transformation begins.  Communities think and act on their relationship with Nature and find cost-saving solutions for conservation that increase commodity value and seed new market opportunities, attracting other cooperatives to join the process.  Consumers grow the process by buying their products.

This scenario of social, environmental change is community-driven and COMACO-supported and has the momentum where scaling to other landscapes has already begun.  As we lead an alliance of cooperatives to market their story and products, we believe a global reach of the COMACO model will begin to unfold.

Aside from consumers of our products who benefit from having more accessible, affordable nutrition in urban and peri-urban communities, we are directly impacting today on 188,000 small-scale farming families or approximately 1.13 million people across the Luangwa Valley ecosystem.

Over the next year, these numbers will increase by 10-20% as cooperatives continue to support new members with the same skills and practices COMACO introduced and promote. This process is helped along through our radio-learning programs, training manuals, and continuous coaching of cooperative leaders and their staff to build viable, self-financing farmer-based organizations.

Within the next 5 years, we anticipate COMACO to expand around Kafue National Park, Africa’s second largest national park and the number of people impacted could easily double to over 2 million.  This possibility is now being explored with various international partners.  It will require significant funding but if we mobilize current and past funders to the cause, a critical level of funding to make this scaling happen is possible.  Such scale and reach to restore harmony to both Kafue and Luangwa landscapes, each representing great biodiversity importance, could be a turning point for a broader global reach of the COMACO model and the It’s Wild! brand.

Transforming farming communities to restore land and biodiversity requires COMACO to create market value for poor farmers who adopt conservation practices across large landscapes. Our goals for the current year to achieve this mission,  especially in the current pandemic,  include

>sufficient export sales to mitigate our risks of defaulting on dollar loan repayments

>verification and sale of 1.1 million carbon units for 37 chiefdoms to demonstrate the value of conservation practices to other chiefdoms

>financial independence for 20+ farmer cooperatives

>fully functioning manufacturing hub supporting the Kafue National Park landscape 

Over the next five years our goal is to operate across two large, separate landscapes, each linked to iconic national parks and charismatic wildlife, where cooperative-led communities help drive It’s Wild! value chains and a powerful story of people learning how to heal our planet that can inspire partners in other countries to embrace the same model.    

Achieving this goal will require:  building staff size and skills, raising finance to support the community transformation process for achieving viable, conservation-compliant cooperatives,  raising capital to establish processing facilities and develop new products, and incorporating key partners supporting different value chains to serve the same mission. 

From a governance perspective, the next five years will lead to a company board structure that includes cooperative leaders and required international expertise to help COMACO stay the course, grow It’s Wild! brand, and be a  global leader for protecting rural landscapes under threat with credible, committed partners to join the journey.

As might be expected, to build multiple value chains sourced from remote farming communities who are asked to comply with conservation farming and land-use practices,  COMACO must deal with a number of barriers, both in the present and future.  

Lack of education in Zambia’s rural areas greatly constrains the speed and competency of farmers to organize themselves into functioning, self-financing cooperatives capable of providing the necessary support services for members to learn and abide by conservation guidelines.  Compounding this problem is the fact that traditional leaders do not have a history of inclusive, transparent leadership, which often leaves segments of a community, particularly women, disenfranchised.

Operating in a land-locked country with limited and expensive ports-of-entry translates into high costs with frequent delays in replacing machine parts that lowers business performance due to costly machine down-times.   These costs are compounded by the high logistic costs of moving commodities from farm-gate to processing plant due to long distances over bad roads. 

On a financial level, there are a number of barriers that COMACO faces.  Currency exchange losses are especially challenging when we have dollar repayments on our balance sheet.  Because we operate a business in fast-moving-goods, we must maintain required inputs into products like packaging, labels, etc.  This requires reliable cash flow made difficult by late-paying customers who buy on credits.   Finally there are many trade barriers in breaking into new export markets, where forex earnings are key to securing finance and managing our bottom-line.

Educational and leadership barriers at the local level are challenging but fixable. Key solutions we are developing include: weekly, local language programs aired on 5 different radio stations to educate rural audiences on a wide range of relevant topics, an annual conservation dividend payment when farmer compliance and leadership standards are met, distribution of a comprehensive relevant skills manual in local language to every household and community leader, on-going training and coaching by trained mentors, and recognition of local champions to encourage others to emulate similar achievements.

Cost-reduction requires IT-based technologies to track inefficiencies and avoidable waste,  complemented by trained staff to monitor and respond to this information.  In addition, development of in-house machine-tool workshops to repair and fabricate spares is a high priority for reducing costs.  Finally, having the means to hire professional Zambian staff is foundational for solvency and meeting mission goals.

Overcoming exchange rate loses requires a combination of fixes: finding concessionary lenders motivated to help at below commercial rates, negotiating terms with banks to allow secured dollars be used as collateral to limit depreciation losses at fixed exchange rates, and building export partners committed to our story and brand with improved branding, product designs, and joint marketing of our social and environment impact.

Supporting these solutions will require partners that are inspired by our goals and willing to help.  In bridging some of these gaps, we have hired a part-time public-relations expert in the USA to help broaden our base of technical and financial support.

• Partners in Food Solution, retired food engineers from General Mills assisting our team develop new products and identify food quality and equipment needs.
• http://www.worldagroforestry.org/ (ICRAF) – co-researching agroforestry impact on yields and plant health
• https://www.iita.org/ (IITA) –co-researching soils for improving plant and product nutrition
• South African Trade Hub to identify trading partners in South Africa, which has led to a number of important export opportunities.
• Sharingourbest, US-based for-profit company that has sole distribution rights of our products in the US and a committed partner to our vision and mission. Zambia’s Department of Natonal Parks and Wildlife and Zambia’s Forestry Department, with whom we have MOUs and work closely together to facilitate COMACO’s role as an agent for change in managing natural resources in communal areas.
• Evergreening Alliance, I serve on their technical advisory committee and offers opportunities for engaging with other partners for scaling COMACO io other countries

COMACO turns smallholder farmers into a business solution for protecting African landscapes richly endowed with such resources as wildlife and forests.  Driving this process is a business approach that adds value to what smallholders produce and how they farm under a brand called It’s Wild!. The It’s Wild! brand has become recognized in Zambia and the sub-region for quality, chemical-free food products, including Peanut Butter, Rice, Honey, Snacknuts (maize, groundnuts, soybeans, and cowpeas), Dried Mango, Dried Mushrooms, Dried Caterpillars, Beans, Yummy Soy (nutrient-enriched porridge/drink) and Soy Pieces (vegetable meat alternative).

Our business unit buys commodities from small-scale farmers who have signed a conservation pledge and have joined their local multi-purpose cooperative.  Our extension department provides training services to these farmers and cooperative leaders and engages cooperatives to manage buying points, oversee crop buying, grade and maintain commodity quality standards, and supervise local farmer trainers.  Over time, this community organization assumes a dominant role in training farmers, storing commodities, and expanding new market opportunities such as organic certification and carbon markets.  Such market opportunities add additional cash flow to sustain COMACO’s working capital needs 

Commodities we purchase include Groundnuts, Rice, Soya, Maize, Honey, Beans, Cowpeas, Wild Mushrooms and Caterpillars, Moringa and Mangoes.  These commodities are then shipped to three factories, referred to as production hubs for product processing, packaging and shipping.  We have invested in product safety to meet international quality standards as well as increased storage facilities and processing capacity to increase our presence in more premium-valued export markets.

COMACO’s path to sustainability is based on three strategies:  1) selling the COMACO model to funding institutions for grants or debt finance, and  2) growing sales volumes of It’s Wild! products for both local and export markets, and 3) sale of carbon credits as a by-product of farmer/cooperative compliance to their conservation pledges and incentivized from It’s Wild! product sales (COMACO derives 35% share of carbon gross sales, communities, 55%, and the Forestry Department, 10%).

This approach has kept COMACO growing and able to maintain operations over the past 17 years with more accelerated growth in recent years as all three strategies combine and add critical investments needs in product improvement, staff hires, and capital development of key infrastructure and equipment.

• Mulago Foundation, $300,000, unrestricted grant, Dec 2019, salaries and working capital
• World Vision, $90,412, restricted grant Sept 2019, cooperative support
• GIZ, $1,882,907, restricted grant, January 2020, cooperative support 
• MCE Capital, $2m, debt finance, April 2020, for crop buying
• High Water Global, $200,000, unrestricted grant, June 2020, capital investment and sundry
• Elephant Cooperation, $100,000,  restricted grant, 2019, purchase of property
• UNDP (GEF5), $870,353, restricted grant, 2019, program expansion in Kafue area
• EU, $370,986, restricted grant, 2019, program expansio
• CMB, $450,000, carbon purchase share, 2019, used to support working capital needs

COMACO has now, after a great deal of work over many years, developed not just its direct impact on people and the environment at substantial scale, but also an underlying business model that can be applied elsewhere (hundreds of thousands of rural producers supplying combination of urban consumers with food products and global consumers with environmental and social goods), an effective starting template for inspiring and organizing rural poor farmers into this operating structure and stimulating local leadership to emerge, related scientific and business data, an inspiring set of stories and photographs, and a deep understanding of the social, environmental, and business forces at play.  THe immediate funding needs to advance this scale and partner buy-in include

• agroforestry practices adopted by 150,000+ new farmers, cooperative leadership and management training to promote farming compliance and enforcement of community conservation plans, and support for verification of 1 million+ carbon credits from COMACO interventions.  Will require funding of $3million over the next 4 years.  To be raised largely as a grant from Evergreening Alliance in 2020
• COMACO replication in the Kafue National Park landscape over the next 5 years with increased volume of It's Wild! products reaching export markets telling our conservation story led by farmers.  We seek $10-15 million to support this expansion, to include: manufacturing hub, farmer support requirements, cooperative  capacity building, and working capital to buy crops and promote exports.  We hope to raise this funding through various partners: Evergreening Alliance, EU, Rotary Club, Green Bonds, and various debt lenders,

Cost of sales: $3,233,026

Operating expenses: $1,681,379

Extension expenses: $2,302,816

Carbon expenses: $1,120,772

TOTAL:  $8,337,993

We are finding, based on very early work in partnership with some other groups, that the combined COMACO package can be provocative and successful for motivating the practical actions of people in other locations who might pursue similar approaches (in partnership with or independent of COMACO). As we begin this stage of replication, it is critical we meet key costs to address those barriers that that could either threaten this outcome or slow its progress.  Toward this end, the Elevate Prize will enable us to overcome various immediate challenges for meeting our longer-term goals.  Specifically, funds would

• Establish two machine workshops for fabricating spares and repairing equipment and transport to ensure uninterrupted product production (approx. $60,000)
• Add critical professional staff:  financial budget controller and compliance officer, export marketing and logistics officer, food processing equipment engineer, and a communications officer (approx. $100,000 for 2 yrs)
• Capital equipment investment in new manufacturing hub: we have purchased property with warehouses and buildings to make a quick start-up in the Kafue landscape possible.  Needed now is processing equipment for 1-2 value added products tailored to farm/forest commodities produced in the area. (approx $200,000)
• Start-up financing of labeling and packaging requirements for premium export markets (approx. $30,000)
• Printing and distribution of our Better Life Book (https://www.itswild.org/shared...) to every COMACO registered farmer and local leader (approx. $25,000)

We are almost exclusively a Zambian staff organization that would benefit greatly from professional mentoring, particularly in areas of marketing and advertising, social media applications, building donor/investor relations, supply chain management, and cost-management and budgeting skills. 

We have a strong, passionate monitoring and evaluation team but it is struggling to transform our data into analytics more easily viewed on our portal to facilitate various forms of reporting.  Expertise in this area would greatly help explain our impact and return on donor investment.

One of the greatest challenges we have is communicating the COMACO story:  how rural lives are changing, wildlife and forests being restored, the quality of our It's Wild! products, etc. to a global audience. Help developing our social media and other media-type skills would help us grow partner relationships we need for scaling the model and driving up sales.