Home Programs Reproductive Health Cooking Fuel Needs in Haiti

By Erin Patrick, senior program officer, Fuel and Firewood Initiative

The needs in Haiti are great—its capital city was destroyed, more than 200,000 of its citizens were killed, hundreds of thousands more were injured and need both basic health care and psychosocial support. Homes and businesses have been reduced to nothing but piles of rocks and dust, livelihoods are gone and schools are closed. Pregnant women who managed to survive the earthquake are giving birth outside, on the ground, with little medical care. In such a situation, it is difficult to determine what are the most immediate priorities—everything is a priority. In the ever-expanding list, however, one of the most basic of all human needs—to cook one’s food—must not be overlooked.

Even before the earthquake, the demand for cooking fuel had put Haiti in a precarious environmental situation. More than 70 percent of the population was reliant on charcoal and firewood to cook its food, and with only 1 percent of Haiti’s forest cover remaining, this was clearly an unsustainable practice. The price of charcoal continued to increase—making it even more expensive over the long term than much cleaner and easier-to-use fuels such as liquid petroleum gas (LPG). And the health consequences from indoor smoke were severe: Haiti has one of the highest rates of tuberculosis in the world. Yet, despite increasingly urgent reports from the World Bank, the UN Development Program (UNDP) and others, no large-scale initiatives were yet underway to assist the women of Haiti to switch to a cleaner, healthier, cheaper, more sustainable fuel.

The earthquake has, in some instances, provided an impetus to try to change some of the more unsustainable, impractical or even dangerous aspects of the pre-earthquake “status quo”—the use of charcoal and firewood among them. So, as the humanitarian and development communities work with Haitians and their government to “build back better,” as the saying goes, the Women’s Refugee Commission was encouraged by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Food Program (WFP) and others to conduct a rapid assessment of cooking fuel needs with an eye toward “building back” a better household energy strategy.

Women's Refugee Commission conducts assessment of cooking fuel needs

Over the course of just a few days, the Women’s Refugee Commission and a WFP representative from Rome worked together on this issue, interviewing dozens of key stakeholders, including the humanitarian workers who are facing incredible odds in getting assistance out to desperate populations; survivors of the earthquake who are now forced to live under makeshift shelters made from bedsheets in public parks throughout the devastated capital city; host families well outside of Port-au-Prince who have taken in as many as 15 new family members and must make do with little to no outside assistance; women who can only afford to cook one pot of rice a day—if that; and men and women who depend on making and selling charcoal to earn their living.

What we found

What we found was dire: though food and “kitchen sets”—which include cooking pots and eating utensils—are in the process of being distributed, not all households had yet received them. Neither cooking fuel nor any sort of cookstove is being distributed, and thus those whose families have received a bag of rice—and even a pot in which to cook that rice—are spending upwards of 40 percent of their daily income on cooking fuel. (Of course, the families that have not yet received the rations don’t have that problem—because they have nothing to cook.) Women without any access to cash have resorted to collecting scraps of scrub bushes growing on the edges of their tent camps to use as cooking fuel. One glance at these rocky, open fields, however, makes clear that it won’t be long at all before even these few branches are gone.

There is no question that the logistical constraints in Haiti right now are massive, and that the humanitarian community is working under tremendous pressure to meet as many of the basic needs of the three million affected Haitians as possible. However, as the rainy season and hurricane season approach, as more food rations are distributed, and after those few branches poking out from the rubble have been burned to ash, the need for cooking fuel will only increase. What was unsustainable before the earthquake is even more precarious now.

Key recommendations

The Women’s Refugee Commission and WFP are urging the humanitarian community to adopt a three-phase cooking fuel strategy (immediate, medium- and long-term response) for three distinct types of affected populations in Haiti (those in Port-au-Prince, host families and rural residents). The full report will be available soon, but general recommendations will be as follows:

In the settlements in Port-au-Prince, most people will continue to use charcoal in the immediate term for lack of other options. However, the medium- to long-term goal should be to support a switch to a more sustainable, healthier, less costly fuel—such as LPG, ethanol and/or biomass/waste briquettes. Innovative ideas such as solid ethanol disks should be immediately tested, including as a potential to meet cooking fuel needs during the rainy season.

For host families, charcoal again is likely to remain a main cooking fuel at least through the medium term. However, the focus should be on providing fuel rations (in addition to food) to reduce the burden of having to cook for so many extra family members, as well as on reducing overall consumption via the promotion of fuel-efficient stoves. Over the medium to longer term, the focus should be on building the capacity of the population to manufacture such stoves themselves as a livelihoods activity.

In the rural areas, which were not heavily affected by the earthquake itself but where charcoal manufacture and sale make up at least 16 percent of all income earned, the focus should be to include these populations in the process of manufacturing alternative fuels and energy technologies over the long term, to ensure that any switch in fuel production does not destroy the rural economy.

Read more about our work on Haiti