3 Billion Use Fire Wood Worldwide

Fire wood stoves and the smoke they produce cause some two million deaths each year from lung cancer and burns. Their fires too, fuel deforestation.

An estimated three billion people worldwide rely on open-fire cook stoves that burn wood, dung or crop residues for food preparation. But the smoke from these stoves harms the environment and can be blamed for some two million deaths every year.

In the aftermath of this destructive means of cooking, El Salvador has embarked on efforts to provide cleaner stoves to people in developing countries.

There have been many efforts so far to provide improved stoves, but with only scattered small-scale success.

Radha Muthiah of Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which was set up in 2010 to bring some coherence to the various efforts, says the agency is trying to find out what works and what doesn’t work to rate the various models for efficiency and to fund research into new ones.

Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is working under the U.N. foundation with a $100 million U.S government grant.

According to Radha, cooking patterns are different. Cultural habits are different. And people everywhere are the same.

One enterprise in Central America, rural El Salvador, believes it offers the right choice. Gustavo Pena, the chief traveling salesman for a cook stove made in his factory, says his invention promises housewives vast improvement in their lives because it burns fuel more efficiently, meaning it needs less firewood and emits less smoke.

The salesman says the stove uses very little firewood because the heat is concentrated in the chamber.

“We normally raffle one stove. The idea is to leave the stove in the community, so that everyone can see it, how it performs, how it really saves wood,” says Pena, the founder of StoveTeam International.

With similar Rotary Club funding, StoveTeam has since set up six factories across Central America and Mexico, each owned by a local entrepreneur. It is a very different approach than most aid groups. They have often imported mass-produced stoves and given them out for free or at almost no cost to users.

 

One reason StoveTeam says it has been successful is that its stoves are locally produced. And their design is informed by local food customs. The biggest problem, most women probably could not afford to buy one.

Pena says it costs about $40 to make one of these models. He sells them for $60. But aid groups subsidize most sales.

However, the lessons not learned in the past can be measured by how many people stopped using the stoves. A 2012 Harvard-MIT study followed 2,600 households in India that were provided improved stoves. It found that most people quickly reverted to their old methods. They weren’t able to start and use the improved stoves properly or maintain them. As a result, there was little benefit to human health or air quality.

StoveTeam wants to make sure the 40.000 stoves it has sold so far remain in use and in working order. It is training teams to visit buyers regularly and survey the use of their stoves.

The plan is to fund these home visits through the sale of carbon credits. Since the stoves reduce emissions, Pena’s company gets credit that it can sell to manufacturers, most of them in Europe, who use them as offsets for their own pollution.

Alter Net