[Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.

[Samer Abdelnour]

Hi Ronal and all,

I'm glad you like the research. I'll do my best to clarify your questions
where I can. I see these as revolving around two subjects: charcoal use and
the potential consequences of employing stoves as being able to solve
significantly complex problems using 'narratives' as evidence (as opposed
to causal evidence).

I'll start with the latter, as it is a topic I've been thinking about for
some time. I will disagree with you on the point that no stove people are
involved in propagating the 'stoves reduce rape' rhetoric. Most certainly,
a number of (mostly US-based) stove designers and promoters (including
NGOs, advocacy organizations, and networks such as the GACC) have used such
rhetoric as a means to justify and direct resources to the promotion of
stoves in humanitarian-conflict contexts. As I've shown prior, suggesting
that i) there is relationship between fuel and sexual violence, and ii)
stoves can manipulate this relationship, depends on a number of
'narratives' that verge on 'myth'. If sexual violence is indeed a complex
and pervasive problem (i.e. women are at risk in camps as much as they are
outside of camps, at hands of neighbors, while collecting water, while
going to market, at work, etc.) then sexual violence is a comprehensive
problem to which stoves can do little to address. Why? Because they depend
on certain myths to be true (i.e. women are only at risk while collecting
fuel, nowhere else).

The consequences of promoting stoves as a solution to rape risk, for poor
women, is quite serious. Why? This changes the fundamental questions
humanitarian policymakers, donors, and workers ask, and the work they do.
For example, the question 'how do we understand and stop rape?' is replaced
with 'how do we develop the most efficient stoves?'. Millions of dollars
have been raised in fundraising campaigns under the guise 'give $30 and
stop the rape of African women in Darfur'. And today, many NGOs and UN
agencies have picked up on the stoves-rape narrative and are handing out
stoves in other countries. In doing so, these organizations actually
believe (and they tell their donors also) that they are addressing
violence, when they are absolutely not able to do so. Hence vulnerable
girls and women are left in a situation where those who claim to serve them
assume the problem is solved, when it isn't.

If you can forgive my academic writing, I'll have you read the following
from the discussion section of the paper:



*The stove panacea is a myth: fuel-efficient stoves are deemed effective
not because of empirical evidence, but from the powerful narratives that
promote claims of what they are able to accomplish (i.e. ‘stoves reduce
rape’). As stove promoters become increasingly dependent on the legitimacy
of these claims, the actual effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of stove
interventions becomes inconsequential. Regimes of truth are thus construed
in ways that render them increasingly unquestionable (Introna 2003). The
myth of the technical panacea enables its diffusion from an originating
context to ‘everywhere’, or more accurately to ‘no-where’. We define this
panacea effect as the propensity for a technical intervention to transform
from a context-dependent response into a universal solution.The consequence
of the panacea effect is an increase in the burden of poverty whenever
user-beneficiaries are thought to self-emancipate through participation.
According to stove advocates, through the simple act of cooking the global
poor will decelerate deforestation, impede global warming, reduce sexual
violence, improve family health, develop ‘sustainable’ markets, and produce
an enduring stream of carbon offsets. On this latter point, through the
intermediating efforts of carbon-certified stove initiatives, women across
the developing world may soon—unknowingly and through utter
necessity—subsidize the polluting activities of global industry. From a
neoliberal perspective, technical panaceas justify the expansion of global
industry and the conversion of poor beneficiaries into mass consumers of
rescuing (western) technologies, techniques, and business models. This too
is a gendered process: inherent in the global concern for women’s welfare
is the belief that poor women will progress through the technologies of the
liberated and developed west (Nader 1989; Wade 2009). The stove panacea
inadvertently (and very subtly) transfers the world’s most serious problems
into the private lives of the most vulnerable.*

On the topic of char. I'm well-aware that charcoal markets are alive and
well in Sudan. However, and though I've seen wood and charcoal being traded
in Darfur's camps (there are large markets in the camps, since the time
they were established) I don't have the figures you are looking for. What I
can assure you is that point 2.e. is still wedded to the idea of an
'exclusive' relationship between fuel and rape. This is not so. In the
Dadaab camps example (explained in the paper), agencies that postulated a
relationship between wood and rape found that given women wood reduced
firewood-related rape but that overall incidences of rape remained
constant. Rape is not dependent on firewood.

Though Practical Action had an LPG programme for Darfur, during the trial
phase the recent conflict forced them to stop their trials. I'm not sure
what happened since. Is LPG an ideal option? I'm not sure. Sudan is a huge
country with many natural resources. I'm sure with some strong management
from the forestry ministry charcoal and other wood related industries could
be sustainably regulated. Certainly there are bamboo industries cropping up
in various regions, many supported by national agencies. Again, I have few
statistics on this, as my focus of research was humanitarian actors and
stove claims.

That said, my deconstructing of the 'stoves reduce rape' rhetoric, as 1 of
3 claims that stoves are purported to solve by GACC and others, is in many
ways a low hanging fruit. I'd love to see more research, along a similar
manner, that explores the other claims (i.e. deforestation, health). For
this a number of things need to be explored:

1 - The problem thought to be solvable through stoves (i.e. health,
deforestation, climate change) needs to be one that is either entirely
caused by cooking or fuel use OR the specific contribution of fuel
use/cooking to that problem needs to be wholly accounted for (separated
from petrol/diesel burning, large industries including agriculture and
livestock, logging, etc.). If this is not done, than the claims that stoves
are able to 'solve' these problems (fully or in part) will remain 'myths',
'narratives', or 'memes'.

2 - How stoves are actually used over time.One such study is from the MIT
poverty action lab, which shows little improvement on health due to
decreasing stove use over time in 2600 households in India (see link
below). This raises a major issue that needs further exploration:
regardless of how stoves test in a lab at one point in time, if over a
longer period of time stoves aren't used or aren't used properly, any claim
of solving major problems will not hold water. Similarly, the tests used to
legitimate stoves need further scrutiny. Testing X stove for Y energy
flows/consumption in a lab does not mean X stove will use less Z fuel in
practice.

http://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/cooking-stoves-indoor-air-pollution-and-respiratory-health-india

Just my 2 cents.

Warmly,

Samer
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