WCS in Zambia
WCS in Zambia has a twenty-five year history of pioneering new approaches to conservation in close collaboration with the Zambian Government.  Key past achievements include:
• The development of a national program for community-based wildlife management;
• Facilitation of a new Wildlife Act reflecting community roles in wildlife management;
• Long-term monitoring tools for assessing wildlife threats;
• A national database for game management areas;
• The establishment of a college for building rural capacity in natural resource management.

The Human Aspect
Conservation challenges evolve as expanding human needs bring new pressures on Zambia’s rich biodiversity, watersheds, and protected areas.  Lack of household livelihood security, particularly family food and income needs, force many households to adopt land use practices that diminish their surrounding natural resources. As a result, wildlife, timber and fish become the currency of survival for many households as rates of exploitation often outstrip rates of renewal. Without appropriate interventions, the end result on wildlife is a degraded landscape with diminishing wildlife numbers and wildlife habitat.

Addressing these challenges has become a major part of WCS’s current focus of program activities.  Research to help guide this work has shown the challenge represents a complex of interacting factors. These include climatic extremes, crop damage from wildlife, lack of appropriate skills to grow food and diversify income sources, need for alternative markets to replace those that encourage illegal or destructive use of natural resources, capacity by producer communities to negotiate better trade opportunities for poor families, and lack of resource ownership rights to encourage improved land management.

Threats
The most important threats responsible for the degradation of wildlife and other natural resources in and around Zambia’s national parks are:
• Hunger;
• Poverty;
• The emergence of commercial farming pressures.
Over the past decade, law enforcement has generally failed to control the harmful impact that stem from some of these threats.  As a result, wildlife numbers have shown dramatic declines in many parts of the country.

WCS Activities
Conservation in Zambia requires innovative solutions to help communities become better custodians of their land.  Finding such solutions requires a results-oriented approach that is science-based and stakeholder-driven, an approach WCS has applied to Luangwa Valley, Zambia’s premiere wildlife area and one of the last remaining wild places in Africa. The conservation model emerging from this work in Zambia builds stable and prosperous trading relationships with rural communities in exchange for learning and applying better farming and land use practices that lowers the level of threats to wildlife and habitat.  Called “Community Markets for Conservation” (COMACO), the model is a network of producer depots linked to a trading center that offers low-cost, high value transaction opportunities for organized “producer groups”, conditional on compliance with conservation guidelines. 

A busy COMACO trading center

Studies prior to 2002 showed that 20 to 60% of local residents in Luangwa Valley were not food secure or grow enough food to meet family food needs for up to 3 months per annum.  Affected farmers typically relied on illegal wildlife poaching to compensate their food shortage by exchanging game meat for food produced by more successful farmers. In areas where wildlife was not a common resource, some families affected by hunger generated extra income to buy food by converting trees into charcoal for sale.

Since 2002, with help from World Food Program, COMACO has successfully established a farmer producer base of over 30,000 farmers who were previously food insecure.  Today they use better food production practices, are significantly more food secure, and over 30% sell farm surpluses through one of 36 trading depots which have also become adult learning centers for life skills needed to live sustainably with their natural resources.  Three regional trading centers support these trading depots by transporting, storing, processing, packaging and distributing value-added products to urban markets under the COMACO brand name, It’s Wild!.  Commodities COMACO currently converts into products include paddy rice, soybeans, groundnuts, honey, vegetables (for tourism lodges), bananas, and farmed fish. The increased value is then passed back to the producer to sustain the incentives for farmer compliance to conservation targets. Similarly, illegal hunters may enroll in a “Poacher Transformation Program” to gain alternative income sources through their local COMACO trading center.

It's Wild! peanut butter

Increased production of food crops and ultimately income benefits associated with COMACO trade schemes are intended to decrease future use of firearms and snares, commonly used by poor farmers to kill wildlife for exchanging game meat with grain. From 2001 to 2005 a total of 20,368 snares were surrendered by farmers from COMACO core areas, and by 2006, over 40,000 snares and 800 firearms were surrendered from the entire COMACO project area.  Results from survey data suggest this removal of snares and firearms has saved up to 5000 wild animals annually. In addition, 331 illegal poachers have surrendered their firearms and have joined the poacher transformation program.  12% of these hunters once hunted elephants.  As incomes increase and food sources diversify, wildlife populations have stabilized and increased slightly since the beginning of COMACO interventions in 2002.

Important Next Steps

COMACO's successful poacher transformation program has resulted in the surrender of over 40,000 snares and 800 firearms

As a rural business model designed to sustain community support for the conservation of natural resources outside protected areas in Zambia, COMACO has reached a scale of impact that the important next steps will be:
• Intensive business planning of current and future products;
• Improved ways to link commodity production to conservation.
Collaboration with various key partners will focus on these priorities as a basis for helping scale-up COMACO’s impact as an effective ecosystem management approach that has the potential of helping sustain the costs and management needs of wildlife throughout many regions of Africa.