Jimmy Mbewe spent six-and-a-half years in prison after he was caught illegally killing an elephant outside South Luangwa National Park here in eastern Zambia.

Poverty drove the father of nine to wander the bush evading wildlife scouts to shoot buffalo and elephant and sell the meat to local traders. "I'm not educated, so I chose my profession as hunting," he says.

Out of prison now, his movements are monitored by a local antipoaching team.

But Mr. Mbewe says he has no intention of going back behind bars. He's now busy learning carpentry skills with other former poachers under the Community Markets for Conservation program.

Mbewe is also learning to farm and work as a beekeeper. As long as he refrains from poaching, COMACO buys his honey at a price higher than the local market average, processes it, packages it, and sends it on to local markets.

The program goes beyond teaching former poachers new ways to earn a living; it is creating a sophisticated network of markets that makes money for locals while reducing poaching, improving land use, and supporting conservation.

"The challenge is you can't demand support for conservation if conservation is a cost," says Dale Lewis, an American conservationist who moved to Zambia 28 years ago as a college research assistant, and has spearheaded the project.

Why poaching continues

Demand for ivory in China and Japan has driven the worldwide illegal ivory trade to its highest level in two decades, a University of Washington study concluded in February, and Zambia appears to be a key source. In 2002, authorities seized 6.5 metric tons of ivory in Singapore, and the university's scientists used DNA testing to trace the source back to Zambia.

Poaching also has a local market. "Bush meat" is readily available in rural communities, and the use of cheap wire snares in some areas has been on the increase, says Rachel McRobb, head of the South Luangwa Conservation Society, an organization founded by safari operators and lodge owners who were concerned about the Zambian government's inability to stop poaching and decided to fund their own group of rangers. They now work under government auspices.

Earlier this year, Zambia's two remaining white rhinos, which were acquired from South Africa in 1993, were shot in a national park in the southern Zambian tourist town of Livingstone, even though they supposedly were under 24-hour surveillance. One died.

Cellphone technology has allowed poachers to become more sophisticated. Plus, Mr. Lewis notes, "[poachers] can't do it without the support of the local community."

In that context, promoting conservation means recognizing the reasons poachers hunt – and setting up a business model that gives local residents the opportunity to make a real, legal, living, says Lewis as he sits outside the program's local trading center. "We wanted to show farmers their commodities were worth a lot more than what they were getting."

The program, which has seen 40,000 snares and over 800 guns surrendered since its inception in 2001 and has won plaudits from the Zambian government, is sponsored by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, the folks who brought you the Bronx Zoo.

Several groups are working to change community attitudes toward illegal hunting in Zambia. One Zambian man, Hammer Simwinga, won the high-profile Goldman Environmental Prize in San Francisco in April for teaching alternative skills to would-be poachers in northern Zambia.

But the COMACO program is unique in the level of business sophistication it strives for.

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