Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO) is a nonprofit organization based in Zambia. Our mission is to work with transformed poachers and small-scale farmers to build stable food systems and to incentivize forest and wildlife conservation. We have been operating in Zambia as a social enterprise for 17 years and engaged with over 225,000 rural small-scale farmers over 11 million square hectares in the Luangwa valley. In addition to enhancing rural food security/resilience, we supply over 8,000 tons (and increasing) of nutritious food products to Zambia’s cities and towns each year, under the brand It’s Wild!. Profits from It’s Wild! sales are filtered back into the communities through dividend sharing and COMACO guarantees premium prices if conservation standards are met. For picture-friendly highlights of our impacts and achievements for 2020, please view our annual report.
Our It’s Wild! products are sold in shops all across Zambia, including our recently launched Green Market Shops, located across Eastern Province. The Green Market Shops allow us to help improve household nutrition, while selling products to low-income consumers at affordable prices. These stores help us reach thousands of people.
As background, one key action of COMACO is to promote adoption of sustainable farming that rotates cereal crops like maize with legume food crops that help to restore soil nutrients. Adding to this approach is our adoption of agroforestry or the planting of nitrogen-fixing trees grown along-side the crops themselves. In this way, we not only improve soil quality and mitigate need for expensive chemical fertilizers for growing crops, but we also increase value for farmers by processing the resulting legumes like soybeans into healthier food products. To promote such products, we’ve invested in equipment to make what we call “soy pieces,” which is a vegetable substitute to meat but looks and taste like meat. Soy pieces is one of COMACO’s seventeen Its’ Wild! food products.
Unfortunately, unknown to the Zambian equipment vendor who sold us the equipment, the processing equipment requires “solvent extracted” soy to make soy pieces. This is the by-product from oil presses that use chemical extraction. If we use the raw soybeans from our farmers, the equipment becomes gummed up. The result is we cannot manufacture soy pieces from what our own farmers produce – which defeats the purpose of our initiative!
Furthermore, over 15,000 of our small farmer-colleagues are already adopting crop rotation with soybeans and agroforestry. We’ve taken a loan to purchase from those farmers who have grown soybeans using sustainable, eco-agricultural practices. We are required to repay the loan after twelve months, following crop buying, processing, and selling the value-added product. Therefore, if we cannot process this year’s soy crop, we have both lost an impact opportunity and created a financial problem.
We have identified an alternative soy processing approach through a company in the USA called Instapro. The approach uses an “extruder” and a “pulverizer” that will allow us to use soybeans from our own farmers, as opposed to the commercially available chemical-extracted soy, to make the final product. Fortunately, we can use the equipment we have already purchased, but without the two added pieces of equipment we are stuck, and we risk failing our farmers and the environmental impact we are striving for. We recently made a down payment of $73,000 to the company to get the purchase moving. However, we are now trying to raise an additional $81,000 to pay the rest of the bill.
From our farmers this year we will produce around 2,000 tons of naturally grown soybeans. If we can secure the two pieces of equipment, we will have the capacity of generating 500kg of soy pieces product per hour. By turning these soybeans into a value-added product that COMACO can sell in supermarkets and in smaller neighborhood shops, we are able to offer more farmers the incentives to adopt the conservation practices we are promoting, while offering a premium price that is 5-10% above the prevailing market price for their crops. This additional income benefits the small farmers directly and helps incentivize farming practices that lead to healthier soils, less need to cut tree in forests, and less wildlife poaching.
With the help of our partner, Elephant Cooperation, which is a 501c(3) charitable organization in the US, we are trying to raise the final $81,000 to better support the farmers we are working with. All donations made through this fundraiser will be given directly to us here at COMACO to make this required purchase.
