Hard-Core Poachers Reformed

The Times of Zambia (Ndola)
May 2, 2005
Stephen Kapambwe

DANNY Tembo lifts up his sweat-drenched face from his rice crop.

His quick, dilating eyes sharpened by many years of detecting both wild animals and game scouts from afar, easily make out an approaching procession of Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) officials from the Lundazi based Conservation Farmer Wildlife Producer Trading Center.

Slowly, he straightens himself up and shouts a greeting to his visitors while unconsciously fingering the hoe in his hand, distinguishing the texture between that of the hoe's handle and the belly of a gleaming muzzleloader he had at one time been accustomed to.

A subtle smile parts his lips.

Although the 48-year-old still daydreams about his destructive past, he represents one of the many hard-core poachers that have been reformed by the WCS Trading Center in the last four years.

Through the Conservation Farmer Wildlife Producer Trading Center, the WCS in Eastern Province has reformed 32,000 families from being dependent on poaching to living on agriculture.

Through the initiative which is run under Community Markets for Conservation and Rural Livelihoods (COMACO) with support from the Project Against Malnutrition (PAM), WCS has recovered a total of 11,000 snares and 680 illegal firearms from people who voluntarily opted to go into agriculture rather than survive on poaching.

The initiative serves an estimated 3,000 wild animals every year.

To witness the success of the project, a 16-man national technical committee assessing the impact of the Food Security Pack recently visited the project in Lundazi.

The technocrats were on a tour of Eastern Province where they were also monitoring the effect of dry spell on the province's food security.

The group comprised officials from the Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit (DMMU) in the Office of the Vice-President, ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives as well as ministry of Community Development and Social Services.

Others were from PAM, which implements the Government component of the Food Security Pack, and the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) that implements the emergency drought recovery project (EDRP) under the Office of the Vice-President.

Speaking when the experts toured the project, WCS regional coordinator Nemiah Tembo said the Conservation Farmer Wildlife Producer Trading Center was formed four years ago with the aim of reducing the destruction of wildlife perpetrated by wanton poaching in game management areas.

Mr Tembo said there was need for communities to be trained in best practices of managing wildlife in order for the people to benefit from Zambia's many national game parks.

He said the project sought to improve the standard of living in vulnerable households by promoting agriculture and conservation-based markets.

" We are trying to teach communities how they can manage wildlife because Zambia has a lot of resources in game parks which can be used to sustain communities.

But we are asking people to surrender their guns and snares before they can benefit from our farming activities," he explained, adding that the project had recovered so many guns from repentant poachers that the police in Lundazi district had run out of space in their armoury.

He said currently, the project was spread across settlements around North and South Luangwa national game parks as well as Lukusuzi National Game Park.

Its areas of coverage include Chifunda, Chitungulu, Kazeute, Mwenya, Mfuwe, Lundazi and Chikwa where its beneficiaries include men and women's groupings as well as vulnerable households.

He said the project was controlled by a community resource board comprising the Community Trading Center, WCS and Lundazi district council with support from PAM which provided farming inputs for reformed poachers under the Food Security Pack.

He said the conservation-based market was opened following a bumper harvest beneficiaries experienced in the project's second year.

Mr Tembo said the center encouraged the farmers by buying crops from them and training them in methods of conservation farming aimed at boosting their productivity.

He said from its successful operations along the Luangwa valley, the project had received many inquiries from communities in plateau areas where more families wanted to benefit from its agriculture initiatives.

In its four-year existence, the programme has conducted extensive training of its beneficiaries who are currently engaged in growing groundnuts, rice, beans, in addition to producing honey and rearing chickens.

The center has since established food processing plants where it trains the farmers to produce packed rice sold under the brand name of Chama Rice. It also produces peanut butter and cooking oil from groundnuts.

Mr Tembo said this year, the center was expecting to produce 200 tonnes of rice, which it hoped to double by next year.

He said the center was also scaling up its activities as result of increasing demand for its services which were spread across 12 depots in the target areas.

He said, the project, which also provided beneficiaries with training skills and tools for carpentry, bricklaying and other off-season activities was now concentrating on identifying gun manufacturers who fuelled poaching through their trade of supplying weapons to the poachers.

However, the need to sustain the programme coupled with the threat of adverse weather conditions has led to the center initiating plans of other activities aimed at making its beneficiaries food secure.

This includes the introduction of treadle pumps to promote dry season farming, and training its beneficiaries in diversification of both crops and livestock.

The project is also developing fences to prevent wild animals from raiding fields cultivated by the farmers.

PAM project manager Ronald Msoni said through the Food Security Pack administered by his organisation on behalf of the Government, PAM was instrumental in setting up the center by providing the farming inputs that were distributed to the farmers.

Chama district commissioner Peter Nyirenda paid tribute to the WCS, saying his district had seen a tremendous increase in the number of wild animals as a result of activities of the Conservation Farmer Wildlife Producer Trading Center.

He said targeted communities in particular and Zambia in general stood to benefit from the center because an increase in wild animals would attract more tourists who would provide foreign exchange.

But he cautioned the WCS to ensure that the animals did not increase to a level were they would start attacking people.

And commenting on the recovered firearms which the WCS has since displayed at the center, Lundazi police officer-in-charge Paul Banda said although the police normally destroyed recovered firearms, it had allowed WCS to display the weapons in an effort to show people that the Farmer Wildlife Producer Trading Centre was a success.

He said the display of the arms was testimony enough that the center had changed people's lives and produced results as tangible as the transformation of Mr Danny Tembo, the man who spent 16 years destroying the wildlife he now protects.

One wonders whether Mr Tembo, a man who successfully lives as a farmer, could have survived the last four years had he still been poaching.

This is because his former trade always put his life somewhere between the possibility of being torn to shreds by a wounded wild animal or being felled by a bullet from the gun of a Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) patrol.

Whichever way one looks at it, farming is definitely far less dangerous.