The UN has a message for the world’s poor: Not let them eat cake, but let them bake cake – and do it on a clean-burning stove.
Refitting households in the world’s poorest countries with modern stoves, instead of crude fireplaces, is a major ingredient in an international drive to end extreme poverty.
The simple absence of a good stove and the kind of electricity that people in developed nations take for granted condemns swaths of the planet to a modern dark age, officials said.
According to the International Energy Agency, more than 20 percent of the global population, or 1.4 billion people, lack access to electricity, while about 40 per cent rely on wood stoves or dung-fuelled fires for cooking.
“This is shameful and unacceptable,” the IEA said in a report released at the UN headquarters in New York during the summit dedicated to tackling poverty.
Yoshiteru Uramoto, deputy director of Unido, the UN body encouraging industrialisation in poor countries, said after presentation of the report that development is impossible “without access to energy”.
He described the magical effect of electricity in a Kenyan village he visited recently, where suddenly the villagers could pump clean water, install an incubator for chicken eggs and transform their personal lives.
“They had a market at night, a street lamp, safety, security, better homework,” Mr Uramoto told journalists.
By coincidence, even some of the world’s most powerful leaders got a taste of the difficulties of life without electricity on Tuesday when a press conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had to be cancelled because of what officials called an electrical malfunction in the UN building.
That, however, was the tiniest blip.
According to the IEA, New York state’s 19.5 million residents consume as much electricity as all the 791 million inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa, excluding more developed South Africa – and things are not getting better quickly.
Current projections by the IEA show that unless action is taken, 1.2 billion people will still live without electricity in 2030, nearly all of them living in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, India and other developing Asian countries.
China is one of the bright spots, with universal electricity availability expected in 2015, followed by Latin America in 2030. According to the IEA study, many people have already been driven back to using wood, charcoal, animal dung and other traditional fuels for cooking because of rising liquid fuel costs and the global economic recession.
And unclean kitchen fuels don’t just mean inconvenience. They ravage families’ health and the environment.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a forum in New York on Tuesday that some three billion people around the world were currently huddled around open fires and inefficient, poorly ventilated stoves.
“The food they prepare is different on every continent, but the air they breathe is shockingly similar: a toxic mix of chemicals released by burning wood or other solid fuel,” Mrs Clinton said.
“As the women cook, smoke fills their lungs, and the toxins begin poisoning them and their children.”
Mrs Clinton announced a public-private-financed plan to install 100 million clean-burning stoves around the world.
In a speech to the annual forum run by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, the US foreign policy chief said the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves” would seek to install the new, $25 units by 2020.