Energy plan may help beat famine

Press, 29 January 1986, Page 18

Energy plan may help beat famine

GEOFFREY LEAN

examines a $5 million

World Bank pilot project in Ethiopia which holds out hope for all of the developing world.

The destruction of trees — usually for firewood — is a major factor in the horrific famines that have recently raged through countries such as Ethiopia, an area once thickly forested. In common with other famine regions, the country, is now almost denuded of the trees which once held soil on the ground and absorbed rainfall for gradual release throughout the year. And, as the trees have gone, people have turned to an even more precious resource: animal dung. Manure, which once went to enrich farmlands, is now often sold as fuel to burn.

Recognising this vicious cycle, the World Bank is sponsoring new techniques being pioneered in Ethiopia which hold out hopes of alleviating both the energy crisis in the developing world and the growth of hunger In Africa at the same time.

This year, a series of pilot projects, financed by the World Bank, will go into production in the famine stricken country to turn previously useless crop wastes into fuel.

The aim is to provide a cheap and viable substitute for wood as the main source of fuel.

Oil and electricity are beyond the reach of most less developed countries. The World Bank team which researched the project, also ruled out solar power, partly because the technology has not been developed well enough, and partly because the people light fires for cooking and warmth at night.

The team also dismissed the most widely canvassed solution to the firewood crisis — the planting of new trees. Trees: take years to grow — too long to alleviate the present crisis. And, the team believes, those that are planted are too valuable as conservqrs of soil and water to be cut down. “So,” says Ken Newcombe, of

the World Bank’s energy department, “we went round asking the question: “Is there anywhere in the present system where there are reserves that can be turned into fuel?."

They came across two prime candidates: the stalks of grain crops, and the residues from harvesting and processing coffee, Ethiopia’s main export. They found that Ethiopia’s state farms, which cover four per cent of the country’s cultivated land, produced about 550,000. tonnes of com, wheat, sorghum and barley stalks, and cotton residues each year. This is the equivalent, says Newcombe’s report, of 700,000 to a million tonnes of firewood — roughly the same as the entire firewood supply to Addis Ababa’s 1.4 million people.

Under the pilot project, stalks will be harvested in bales and stored in the open in stacks covered with a simple straw thatch to provide protection against the weather. Throughout the year this stock, accumulated during the harvest season, will be shredded, ground, and then pressed into brickettes about the size of children’s building blocks. Tests suggest that they have a higher calorific value than wood.

More brickettes are to be made of coffee wastes which at present are a public nuisance. Most Ethiopian coffee is processed in 55 different towns by a “dry” system, which blows out pulp from the “cherry” which surrounds the coffee beans. This piles up outside the processing plants, and rots. As it ferments, it spontaneously ignites, and slowly

smouldering heaps are common beside the processing stations.

The rest of the coffee is processed at 164 “wet” pulping stations. These produce better coffee — and a wet pulp which is flushed into local streams forming a putrescent mass which poisons drinking water and kills water life.

The $lO million pilot project in Ethiopia will produce 25,000 tonnes of fuel from crops and coffee wastes each year for the next three years. If It succeeds it will then be expanded. Similar schemes have been written off in the past because the fuel they produce would have been much more expensive than wood. But the price of fuelwood in African towns and cities has been doubling every seven years as trees disappear, making the alternatives often much cheaper. The brickettes are also less than half as costly as kerosene, electricity, or gas. Now the World Bank Is thinking of applying the same techniques to the energy-starved Pacific Islands. There Is not much hope of generating energy from the sun or the wind, says Newcombe, and most of the natural forests have long since disappeared. But there are some 51 million coconut trees covering a million acres of the tiny island nations.

Newcombe calculates that the husks of coconuts, turned into brickettes, could provide the energy equivalent of more than two million barrels of oil a year — or twice the amount of oil used in industry and commerce in the region. Copyright London Observer Service.