Cornell University and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) were recently awarded nearly $1.2million from USAID’s Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM CRSP). This grant is a multi-year, multi-disciplinary award to develop a participatory socio-economic model for food security, improved rural livelihoods, watershed management and biodiversity conservation in Zambia. SANREM CRSP is an initiative of USAID established in 1991 at the request of the US congress to encourage US universities to conduct research on needs of sustainable agriculture and natural resource management in developing countries.

Spearheaded by the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM), a leader in its field, the grant will use a systems approach and engage Cornell departments as diverse as food science, business, and sociology. The grant is designed to test and optimize a market-driven approach called “Community Markets for Conservation” (COMACO), pioneered by the Wildlife Conservation Society. Unlike many other community-based conservation efforts, COMACO is being developed to improve biodiversity conservation through improvements in food security and livelihoods.

Food insecurity and poverty are two of the greatest challenges facing many developing countries. Unsustainable agricultural and natural resource management practices coupled with unsound economic strategies have contributed significantly to food insecurity, limitations in livelihood opportunities, and diminished biodiversity. Much of Africa has not escaped this phenomenon.

The novelty of COMACO is that it will use markets to tie economic development explicitly to agricultural and development practices that are environmentally sustainable. COMACO’s economic development will be based on traditional business principals such as cost reduction, improved market access and the creation of value-added products. Using participatory methods, this effort will identify interactions between humans, domestic animals and wild species as well as assess how the needs of the local communities can be addressed. In order for farmers to participate in COMACO, they must agree to forego wildlife poaching, and must turn in guns and snares as part of their demonstration of this commitment. The COMACO system functions to creates a feedback loop of positive incentives that make conservation farming a more rewarding strategy than activities like poaching- and in fact recovering wildlife populations in turn offer new economic opportunities through COMACO-initiated community-based tourism enterprises.

“The sheer size of this initiative is at once one of its great strengths and biggest challenges. COMACO now operates over 25,000 km2 and has more than 30,000 participating families, and is growing constantly,” states Alex Travis, Assistant Professor of Reproductive Biology at the Baker Institute for Animal Health at Cornell, and co-Principal Investigator on the award.

COMACO was initiated by WCS’ Dr. Dale Lewis in the Luangwa Valley of Zambia, which is considered the most valuable wildlife region in the nation. The buffalo, lion, leopard, elephant, eland, hartebeest and other animals roaming the valley are a critical factor in the success of Zambia’s tourism industry. COMACO is a community-owned enterprise which implements sustainable agricultural practices starting at the level of individual farms. By using extension support, marketing, and pricing strategies organized around its regional trading centers, COMACO has been able to increase local stakeholder profits.

Conservation farming techniques are tailored to the needs of the individual so participants can choose between groundnuts, maize, rice, soybeans and honey production. This choice is particularly important for the large percentage of households led by women, a consequence of the high rate of infection with HIV/AIDS. COMACO has found that there are distinct gender preferences for different crops. In addition, the location of the farm and quality of the soil help determine crop selection. For example in the northern district rice is more common than in the southern arid districts. According to Dale Lewis of WCS in his report Rural Markets, Agriculture and Wildlife Management, farmer profits have increased 30% for rice, 67% for honey, 25% for groundnuts, and 80% for chickens.

Preliminary field research shows that these market incentives are sufficient both to foster sustainable agricultural practices and increase wildlife populations. This in turn has made it possible to consider creating supplemental tourism-based economic opportunities for the local community. Not surprisingly, due to its preliminary successes, COMACO has been invited to expand into surrounding provinces and nearby regions.

This is where the new research grant comes in. Before expanding, Cornell’s researchers will work with the local communities to test whether the COMACO model can be economically self-sustaining without external subsidies, while improving food security and rural incomes. Business assessments and macro-scale natural resource economic valuations are going to be used to examine the model. To test whether the COMACO model can be socially self-sustaining, researchers will test the effects of the COMACO model on the social environment, including issues such as gender equity, public health, HIV/AIDS awareness, economic decision-making, and local governance.

Finally, changes in wildlife populations will be measured to test whether the COMACO model will sustainably improve biodiversity and watershed conservation. This will be performed with a combination of direct aerial surveys, ground censusing and indirect assessments of wildlife health. The effects of deforestation on watershed management will be monitored by a combination of field site inspections and satellite imagery. For both of these studies, comparisons with control regions where COMACO is not active will determine causality between sustainable agriculture practices and improved biodiversity conservation, deforestation rates, and erosion.

This SANREM CRSP grant will allow a multi-disciplinary team of researchers to pursue issues regarding soil, crop, food, business, veterinary and social sciences that are needed to optimize this market-driven strategy founded on stakeholder empowerment. This research is expected to inject new technologies and generate new knowledge needed to scale-up the COMACO model, which will improve food security, rural livelihoods and biodiversity throughout participating regions.

According to Alex Travis, “The partnering of academic researchers with non-governmental organizations like WCS should create synergy in helping both institutions better fulfill their missions while providing outstanding training opportunities for students from many disciplines.”

Monica Touesnard is Managing Director of the Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab™ at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. She is also editor of boplab.org, the online journal of the BoP Learning Lab™.

Cornell University and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) were recently awarded nearly $1.2million from USAID’s Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM CRSP).