[Stoves] Stove types and poverty [Was Rogerio: Pro-publica article out]

Wed Jul 25 16:32:55 CDT 2018

Dear Kirk

Bleak for whom? We are having blazing successes.

I helped Dr Anderson a hundred times, especially in the early days. I tested his charcoal maker in India when no one else would.

I helped Dr Nurhuda turn some bleak and uncontrollable “attempts” into top class performers, using the YDD Lab in Yogyakarta. It took three years.

Rebecca and I have been cooperating for years. She even came to my Stove Design Camp to get testing, advice, alternatives and theory classes. Her stoves work and are accepted. We are now discussing fish smokers in First Nations communities.

Alexis, I met and enjoyed. He focuses on one fuel. I don’t have any.

I have provided dozens of suggestions to Dean and his minions. Only Nordica and Peter Scott accepted any of them. They are both gone from there.

What’s on these days: Hebei Province, heating stoves with 60% reduced emissions (against a pretty good baseline), 800,000 homes); Mongolia: we must that the new radically improved designs are acceptable and multiply production; Kyrgyzstan: starting to replace stoves in 11,000 homes.  The targets total only a million homes, but that was GACC’s 8 year target and we will do it in 4, with less money. Almost none for overheads.

We are glad, not glum.
Crispin

Wow!  Life must be bleak for you guys.  ☹

I suggest that to get out of your doldrums you support some positive people and projects, examples like Dr. Anderson, Dr. Nurhuda, Dr. Paul Taylor,  Rebecca Vermeer, Alexis Belonio, Dean Still, or other of your choice.  😊

Kirk H.

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From: Nikhil Desai<mailto:pienergy2008 at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2018 12:18 PM
To: Xavier Brandao<mailto:xav.brandao at gmail.com>; Rogerio carneiro de miranda<mailto:carneirodemiranda at gmail.com>
Cc: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott<mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>; Discussion of biomass cooking stoves<mailto:stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Stove types and poverty [Was Rogerio: Pro-publicaarticle out]

Rogerio:

I generally think that all statements about cookstoves are contextual and it is not too difficult to find anecdotes on two or more sides of any issue.

That said, I find it a general truism that stove advocates have over-emphasized fuel savings and that this obsession - especially when measured with unreliable test methods - has been the Achilles heel of many "projects." (That the "projects" universe has certain damning restrictions is another matter, efficiency being only one such.)

I saw rocket stoves production and use only once, and came away feeling it must have some market somewhere, for grant givers if not users. I have seen other examples of "fuel-saving" and "smokeless" biomass stoves; little attention to fuels, meals, cooks. Money is a secondary problem from public policy perspective; subsidies can be designed to accelerate the uptake of stoves and fuels if they are going to be used, even with stacking.

As for "poor households", I wonder if there has ever been any systematic study with stratified poverty and multiple fuels/stoves/meal types. In "poverty" literature, it has long been accepted that survey data on expenditures, while they help characterize income poverty, say nothing about the processes of poverty and non-income dimensions of poverty. (See UNDP/OPHI reports on Multi-dimensional Poverty Index.]

And it is next to impossible to get reports on relative price differences across different populations of the poor, so it is impossible to tell just how the markets for the poor are working. Take, for instance, a ratio of a cheapest commercial meal (safe enough to eat and feed children) to average day-labor wage rate, or a ratio of a kg of local bread to a liter of milk, or the price of the most common mattress to the most common mobile phone. You get the idea. Without such information it is impossible to distinguish one customer group from another and design, test economical stoves accordingly. The rich are alike everywhere, the poor are different from place to place, time to time.

That is, if the objective is to serve the poor, we don't have the barest of information to understand poverty, which keeps changing in different dimensions.

I fully agree with you that "A really good biomass stove is expensive for very poor households". But then the questions are,

i) What does a very poor household want in an improved stove - reliable fuel efficiency or low smoke, or, often, nothing, because the head of the household wants to fix a window or throw a party?;
ii) What is "good enough" in the sense of "marketable, usable" for not-so-poor households and what all determine the overall economy of cooking - not just costs of competing stoves and fuels but availability and cost of water or food ingredients;
iii) Are there "cooking systems" options that actually help alleviate poverty in terms of freeing up cash savings or time?

I have observed that "commercial cooking" does address this last question. Some ten years ago, Anil Rajvanshi came up with the idea of rural cafeterias for the working poor, which was the other side of the same coin - outsource cooking.

Let me give two examples - injeras in Addis Ababa (which I visited often between 1992 and 2007) and tortillas in Central America (which I haven't).  Why haven't "really good biomass stoves" made any dent in that market?

As I started telling colleagues some years back, "While you have made money on writing books for poor people's cooking, they have chosen to get rich enough to afford LPG and electricity." And "You are still thinking of yo' mamas when you think of saving wood; think of yo' dottas." (Remember Kirk Smith's epiphany watching young women in rural India swooning over Philips stove, "It burns like gas!" )

Why has it been so difficult to develop and prove "Burns like gas" biomass stoves? This was the headline of a 2012 paper by Kirk Smith and Karabi Dutta. At the time, there was a lot of talk of Advanced Biomass Stoves, in India and in Central America at least.

It is too easy to blame GACC. The illuminati at Lima and the Hague chose how to spend EPA money - on New Source Performance Standards, applicable to any country that chooses, just not the US. GACC was just an excuse to commit and disburse monies so US Secretaries of State could boast and UN Foundation could profit.

Saving the poor is as much of a delusion as saving the earth. Both are inscrutable. But different religions offer salvation.

Nikhil
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