Firewood, coal kill 1.5 million worldwide yearly

WHO proposes a shift towards ‘cleaner, more modern fuels’ that are unfortunately beyond the reach of pauperized majority of Third World dwellers

By Ntaryike Divine, Jr. in Douala

A recent WHO report warned that primitive methods of cooking and heating were tacitly snuffing some 1.5 million lives yearly, and mostly in the Third World.

The report, published last year, additionally indicated that more than 3 billion people worldwide
depended on solid fuels like firewood, dung, crop residues and coal for cooking and heating purposes. Such reliance, it said, caused indoor pollution which in turn provoked diseases like pneumonia and chronic respiratory complications affecting mostly women and kids.

Solid fuel dependence and subsequent indoor pollution accounts for 5 per cent of all deaths and diseases in the 21 most-affected countries named in the report which are Afghanistan, Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, DR Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Pakistan, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo and Uganda.

After noting that solid fuel usage has become one of the ten most significant menaces to public health worldwide, the WHO is proposing a drift from the primitive and polluting heating and cooking methods to more contemporary, safer and cleaner fuels like biogas and kerosene. In fact, energy and environment ministers from some of the concerned countries met in New York late April within the scope of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development.

Their intention was to settle on whether or not to rank indoor pollution on country policy agendas. If that were to be the case, it would imply that strides be engaged towards reining in dependence on solid fuels especially in the worst-affected countries. The same countries would also imperatively have to ensure that costs of contemporary fuels like the aforementioned biogas and kerosene are slashed.

That is already almost unimaginable in a country like Cameroon where despite its poise as an oil-producing nation, fuel prices have galloped steadily over the past couple of years. Kerosine currently costs almost 500 FCFA (about 1 USD) while the cost of a 12-kg bottle of cooking gas skyrocketed to 6.500 FCFA.

Even in the urban areas where dependence on solid fuels was relatively low compared to the rural parts of the country, households have returned wholesale to solid fuels, disconnecting gas bottles and depending on candles for lighting amidst frequent power cuts, and firewood for cooking.