From elephant slaughter to investing in a conservation business

The ghastly image of an elephant with its head hacked and chopped in half and missing its tusks in a pool of blood was sadly one of many I witnessed as an elephant biologist in Luangwa Valley. That was over 25 years ago.

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/