Mr. Dale Lewis (CEO) | Interview given to Ms Maria Louisa Vafiadaki
-Please talk to us about COMACO. When did it start and what is its vision?
20 years ago, I was helping protect elephants in Africa and came into contact with so many poachers. I had the chance to meet a group of poachers who had just been arrested and they told me why they had killed the elephants. They needed money for fertilizer and to send their kids to school and people who were interested in buying ivory had given them the ammunition and guns to do the hunting. So, you ask yourself “who is really the poacher?” And you think of the grain traders who also exploit small-scale farmers…
One thing that struck my attention was that we were doing some research on the change of the landscape in a region in Zambia which is rich in wildlife. What we learned was that the trees were disappearing and there was a wave of deforestation caused almost entirely by the commodity trade of a non-food crop that was benefiting multinationals outside Zambia, at the expense of taking advantage of poor farmers for their cheap labor and with no accountability of the impact their crop had on the land. Conservation wasn’t working and we needed a solution. I met with community leaders, we sat down and I asked them how to start.
Law enforcement was not a solution, as we could not arrest everybody. So, we dreamed up the idea of creating community markets for conservation. That concept was born in a room with 10 village leaders, and that was what we called our company, Community Markets for Conservation or COMACO, for short.
Today, 20 years later, we employ 300 people and work with 250.000 farmers. This is when we are beginning to see real impact. We make conservation profitable and the farmers to the conservation by farming the right ways so they can reduce the need to clear more land and can support their families without having to poach. This working model is not so much driven by profit, but there are multiple returns such as healthier families, a better environment, more protected biodiversity, less greenhouse emissions and a whole range of healthy food product we manufacture under the brand It’s Wild!, all sourced from the same farmers.
-Which problem are you mainly addressing? Poaching, erosion of crops, poor farming practices, poverty..?
I think it’s the challenge of transforming a culture and making communities with their own traditional leadership, history and traditions change. The question we ask them is “what do you want your land to look like 20 years later”. Trees are disappearing, land is degrading, we see the effects of climate change. How do they see their future ? Their problems become our problems. We adopt the right practices that allow the land to stay healthy and families stay out of poverty.
Another challenge is learning the science and translating it into local language, introducing new concepts and methods about farming to keep the soil healthy and understand how to do it. It is certainly a long-term commitment.
-In what ways does COMACO incentivize sustainable farming and conservation?
I went to a trader who bought grain and asked him how he makes money. He told me “you go down as soon as you can after the rain, because that is when they have the least amount of money. If you go there when they are poor, you get your crops very cheap”.
Who is the poacher now, I thought… The first crop we worked with was rice. I didn’t even do a business plan. I just said I’ll find the money, even if I lose it, to show the impact. Suddenly, there was a surplus. People had food and they could sell.
We diversified into a wide range of food crops and we came up with a brand and added premium value for our farmers that adopt our practices. We give priority to communities which are committed to COMACO’s approach to farming, but also land management.
-What are the principles of sustainable agriculture and agroforestry?
Firstly, you need to have a positive net balance of nitrogen without using chemicals and you want to be capturing carbon in the soil. These two go together. More carbon in the soil has better activity that contributes to nutrients for crops. The tree that we use to help feed the soil is an incredibly important tree for our farming system. We plant them in rows right in the field where we get the crops. 5 leaders apart and the trees are 1.5 metres apart. They literally pull minerals deep in the soil up into the leaves that become green manure for our crops and their roots fix nitrogen that also get assimilated into the leaves. Before planting, farmers strip the leaves as green manure for fertilizing their soils. This creates a mutualistic relationship between farmers and nature to keep the soils healthy so that the ecosystem of crops can be sustained.
That’s what nature does, it sustains itself. Farmers are learning these lessons and realizing chemical fertilizers are not the answer. They are expensive, harm the souls, and add to global warming.
80% of workers in Zambia are small scale farmers. We work in 25% of the land area in Zambia. We have a long way to go. We are planting upwards 60 million trees of the species that help to keep soils fertile – it is called Gliricidia sepium. Once those trees get established, their labor goes down, their income goes up and they are helping make conservation work and our markets give them a good return to keep them committed to this way of farming.
-Your use community-run cooperatives to promote your work. Please describe this working model. How does it facilitate your efforts and why is it efficient?
I wouldn’t say our approach is necessarily efficient, but compared to everything else out there, it is. We employ a model of empowerment. We work with locals who have a know-how and this way we minimize their risks to farming. The community feels empowered as their local farmer cooperatives takes over much of the work for training and organizing crops for markets. Slowly we are becoming one company work for the farmer, the consumer, and the environment.
-52% of your farmers are women. How important is this and what message does it send to the world?
Culturally women have less power than their husbands in making family decisions. However, their passion for being a good mother makes them our primary farmers. If they know that their children will have a better life and future by being part of COMACO, they will never do anything to cheat COMACO. Their loyalty and passion to influence other women is so strong and they continue building the rest of the story.
Most of our stories are about women. We have transformed close to 2.000 poachers who put down their guns. They all have wives who can tell them it is time to change because farming now pays better than poaching.
-I understand that trust is a vital element to success in your work. How do you build and secure that trust within your partners?
We think of leadership in terms of people that have seen how hard we work, how we have been honest in fulfilling our promise and they have seen the development of our infrastructure. Today, we have 78 vehicles and 5 processing plants. They see us committed, but we are not like other companies. We really help them learn skills they need to become more productive and profitable themselves.
We differentiate and provide extra incentive to the communities so that they receive a conservation dividend and continue to develop their cooperatives. We help communities improve the land. If you work with these communities, you will discover people with great leadership skills and as a company you can delegate responsibility to them to help shoulder some of the tasks that the community can do better than we can do. This way, the community sees COMACO as their company. You build commitment and loyalty.
-How are your efforts financed? Could you mention some of your donors?
We work across entire communities that have been historically quite poor with a track record of malpractices to their land. They will continue to do these things because these people have problems and serious needs. They couldn’t think twice of cutting down a tree so that they can buy medicine or send their kid to school. We live in a world with environmental problems. Our company operates to reduce these threats through a market approach.
Consequently, we need financing from lenders who understand our mission and perhaps may want to be part of it by offering rates we can afford. What happens in our case is if the interest rate is high, the financial pump to push money into the community for the crops they produce is too expensive and we can’t get enough money into the local economy for them to see the benefits of conservation. Our interest rates are too high and that’s the problem we are now facing.
Our margins are not that great, our risks are high, we suffer from currency exchange and face high logistic costs. Yet, the lender still expects us to pay the interest. Typically, we end up in the red at the end of the year and I have to raise more money just to breakeven. Yet, our product sales for the 20 products we now have on the market are of high quality, sell very well, and currently reaching even regional export markets. We are on a path toward financial sustainability but it has taken time as we’ve given priority to the needs of poor farmers. Why? Because you can do conservation without them, and if motivated with market incentives, they do it better than most.
-How can one reach you? Please mention the ways one can support your mission.
They can write directly to me via e-mail dlewis@itswild.org. Often people want to find out more about us, and I am more than happy to explain to them. Also, our website has a page for making a donation at www.itswild.org.
At the moment, we are scaling and taking this model to the other side of the country in Zambia. We need to build a new processing plant and are facing different challenges. We are just getting into our third year of this scaling initiative, so financing would really help us right now.
Thank you.
