Charcoal and Clean Cook Stoves (Part 1)

     Charcoal. It is everywhere. You may see it for the first time when you drive from the airport through the main market in Port-au-Prince. There is a section of the market where charcoal is sold from large sacks.

Sacks of charcoal at Port-au-Prince market

If you drive by in the early morning, you will see tap taps unloading large sacks of charcoal that arrive from the countryside. Out on National Route 2, tap taps stacked high with bags of charcoal roll down the highway toward PauP. Far from PauP, in Baradères, a large tap tap rumbles in every day headed toward the town square. It unloads goods from PauP and loads up with charcoal to sell in PauP. In any market place, in any town, large and small, you will see charcoal being sold.

Charcoal for sale in Gressier market

     Charcoal is everywhere. Its manufacture starts up in the mountains, above towns like Baradères. During a recent visit to Baradères, I sat on the porch of the priest’s house and watched as night fell, plunging the countryside into darkness. I could make out several points of light up in the mountains. They were not artificial lights. The lights were bonfires of wood being burned into charcoal. The charcoal will be packed into grey sacks and then placed at intervals along the road leading down from the mountains into Cavaillon. Tap taps pass along the road and collect the sacks of charcoal to sell in PauP.

Tap tap carrying sacks of charcoal along the road to Baradères

     Charcoal is made everywhere, not just in Baradères and the mountain communities. It is also made in the field across from Christianville. Someone will collect tree branches and other pieces of wood, trim them and make a pyre to burn into charcoal.

Wood prepared to burn into charcoal

Sacks of newly made charcoal awaiting pick up and transport

     The harvesting of trees and the burning of wood to produce charcoal is the way many people earn a living. It is also the main reason for the deforestation of the country. Vast expanses of the mountainsides are stripped of their trees. Loss of the forest brings a cascade of environmental disasters starting with massive erosion during the rainy season and loss of rich farmland. The flooding produced by the rains destroys housing and drowns livestock. The soil washes down the unprotected mountains and silts the rivers and bays making waterways difficult to navigate. The Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, described it so well in his novel, Gouverneurs de la Rosee. « les érosions ont mis a nu de longues coulées de roches: elles ont saigné la terre jusqu’a l’os. » (“erosion had stripped clean the long stretches of rock: they had bled the earth down to the bone.”).

Deforestation of the mountains

Deforestation of  the mountains

     Charcoal is burned in the home. The main fuel for cooking in Haiti is charcoal. In PauP in late afternoon, you may even see women in business attire stop to buy a small bag of charcoal on their way home for cooking the evening meal. There is no natural gas distribution system in PauP. The other option is propane stoves but even in the PauP middle class, not everyone can afford a propane cook stove. So everyone cooks with charcoal. In addition to the ecological consequences of using charcoal as a fuel, the health consequences of cooking with charcoal are not trivial. Respiratory problems and eye irritation are two of the most common complaints of women who come to the clinics. Similar health problems afflict young children who are in the home all day while the women cook the family meals. If there were another way to cook that did not use charcoal, the positive impact on health and the environmental would be huge.

     One of the great things about my experience in Haiti is making connections with a lot of different people who stay at the guesthouse who are involved in different activities, scientific and non-scientific. There are a lot of things that really interest me in terms of how we can improve the lives of Haitians and help them help themselves in the area of development. One of the more fascinating projects I learned about is Project Gaia (http://www.projectgaia.com/). Dan, Brady, and Hillary from Project Gaia arrived in Christianville to demonstrate the ethanol-fueled cook stove in the communities around the area. They stayed at C’ville and we talked a lot about their project. Project Gaia is promoting the CleanCook stove

http://www.dometic.com/

which burns alcohol fuel without smoke, is easy to use, is highly efficient, and affordable to run. The stove is stable, burns cleanly, and the fuel is stored safely in a non-spill fuel tank. The stoves have already been demonstrated in Ethiopia and have a high level of acceptance among the women who have used them. Project Gaia wants to start a program to sell these cook stoves in Haiti. The clean-burning ethanol stove addresses the problems of unhealthy and unsustainable cooking fuels that I outlined above. I was very impressed with these three young people who were managing projects in Ethiopia and now in Haiti. We talked about the advantages and disadvantages, the acceptability and performance of the stoves. Everything seemed positive. In the small demonstrations that they did during the few days they were here, Dan said that the women in the Gressier area who tried out the stoves loved them. The stoves are reasonably priced and will last up to 10 years. The main issue is availability of the fuel. The ethanol necessary to fuel the stoves is not readily available in Haiti. Identification and development of local sources of alcohol production is an important facet of Project Gaia.

    What are the next steps for ethanol-fueled cook stoves in Haiti? See Part 2, post 03-22-14.