Our vision is a Luangwa Valley ecosystem made secure from human disturbances by sustaining liveable incomes and household food needs through trade incentives that drive land use practices supportive of well-managed landscapes and natural resources.
Our mission is to provide marketing services, trade benefits and extension support aimed at incentivising farmers to adopt improved land use and farming practices that promote natural resource conservation and better quality of life for small-scale farmers.
COMACO is a limited-by-guarantee company capable of working at an ecosystem scale to improve the way small-scale farmers sustain a better life from their land. By bringing the right knowledge and skills and the right market incentives to small-scale farmers, COMACO is able to transform entire communities into responsible stewards of their land and resources.
As COMACO we see ourselves as pioneers in building commercial links between small-scale farmers and conservation. Through these efforts, windows of opportunity have opened in ways COMACO never imagined.
When we first started, our farmers could not feed themselves. Now they are feeding a nation while keeping land and resources safe. Building on this legacy has meant we’ve had to grow in size, professional capacity and funding support.
The beauty is that these farmers once could not feed themselves. Now they are feeding a nation while keeping land and resources safe.
The Luangwa Valley is Zambia’s icon for Africa’s wild treasures, supporting the largest hippo population on the continent and among the largest elephant and large carnivore populations. It is vast. Much of it is unspoiled beauty, locked away in national parks for current and future generations to see and marvel at. It is also part of an ecosystem that increasingly shows signs of damage from the relentless pressures of human activities, largely farming and land clearing. It is this nexus between farming and conservation that will continue to challenge many such wild places in Africa. Luangwa Valley has become a living laboratory where the COMACO approach was born to address such problems. In this living laboratory, COMACO is testing the critical premise that small farmers using the right farming practices and with the right kind of market incentives can be allies and not adversaries to conservation.
www.itswild.org