Dutch NGO Promotes Clean Smoke-Free Cooking

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Dutch NGO Promotes Clean Smoke-Free Cooking

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Moving Away from Traditional Cooking
Cambodianess 24/09/2020 2:20 PM

The Netherlands Development Organization (SNV) has operated in the region since 2015, establishing a market for clean cooking through biogas programs and interventions against firewood and charcoal cooking in Vietnam, Lao PDR and Cambodia. Bastiaan Teune of SNV sits down to explain the improvements to millions of lives made by SNV’s cookstove.

Cambodianess: Can you introduce Netherlands Development Organization (SNV) and your energy program, what are you doing or trying to achieve?

Bastiaan Teune: Netherlands Development Organization (SNV) has headquarter in the Netherlands and is active in 29 countries around the world. We execute projects in agriculture, water and sanitation and energy that improves the lives of millions. All our projects have a common aim, which is to reduce poverty sustainably, by bringing lasting systemic change. Systemic change means the establishment of markets—of clean cooking technologies—to attract investments, to advise governments to apply supportive policies and to create a new normal.

In the Mekong region since 2015, SNV has established markets for clean cooking through national biogas programs, and wood and charcoal cooking interventions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. As a result, millions of people have gained access to improved and clean energy for cooking through our work and with our partners and donors like Energising Development (EnDev), managed by [German Development Agency] GIZ.

Cambodianess: What is so important about cooking?

Bastiaan Teune: Cooking is seen by most people as a simple daily action that relates to our basic needs and to appetite and taste. But at SNV we look at it from the lens of livelihoods, public health, gender and climate change; and we work in concerted efforts with governmental policies, private sector development and behavior change of cooks on household level. We test stove models and we dig deep into the physics of combustion and heat exchange. There is simply no end to what you can learn and what you can achieve in this exciting energy sector.

For instance, unknown to most is that, with the invention of cooking some two million years ago, and the change in diet from raw to cooked food, the extra nutrition gave our brains the means to develop. Cooking must have ignited a tremendous boost to evolution and our ability to read this very article!

Traditional cooking also has negative side effects unfortunately, for instance on global warming as the burning of wood for cooking emits greenhouse gasses in the form of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. The combined emissions from all these small cookstoves in the world are as harmful as the entire aviation industry.

Cooking on wood also pollutes the air in kitchen areas, so that cooks, and their children, are exposed to an equivalent of smoking 10 cigarettes per day. This pollution is associated with severe respiratory diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). In Cambodia, there are around 2.5 million families still using traditional cookstoves with solid biomass such as wood, charcoal, and agricultural waste. The World Health Organization estimates around 11,000 people in Cambodia die prematurely per year due to indoor air pollution; poor health condition also increases vulnerability to COVID-19.

Cambodianess: What can be done to improve the cooking situation?

Bastiaan Teune: There are several obstacles that need to be overcome in creating demand by households and move away from traditional cooking to clean cooking. One is awareness; many cooks tell us their family has been cooking for generations and never thought of the consequences. Therefore, SNV offers behavioral change communication in villages in Siem Riep and Kampong Speu provinces, together with the Commune Committee for Women and Children to discuss the matter in group settings. Secondly, we host a vigorous Facebook page where advanced biomass stoves are presented and to stimulate demand.
Full interview: https://cambodianess.com/article/moving ... al-cooking
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Re: Dutch NGO Promotes Clean Smoke-Free Cooking

Post by SternAAlbifrons »

Great initiative.
Maybe they can start at the beginning - with those plastic bag firestarters.
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Re: Dutch NGO Promotes Clean Smoke-Free Cooking

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SternAAlbifrons wrote: Sun Oct 04, 2020 2:10 am Great initiative.
Maybe they can start at the beginning - with those plastic bag firestarters.
The guy doing the cooking for the crew who built our house would burn pieces of Moto inner tube to get the charcoal going.
:facepalm:
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Re: Dutch NGO Promotes Clean Smoke-Free Cooking

Post by SternAAlbifrons »

Yeah, that works well too.

:hattip:
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Re: Dutch NGO Promotes Clean Smoke-Free Cooking

Post by newkidontheblock »

Convincing villagers to stop doing something that is essentially free.. gather wood, make fire, cook.

Into, buy a cooktop. Buy a gas cylinder. And the cylinders don’t last forever, either. To do essentially the same thing.

For some of the poor villagers, it might boil down to the choice of buying all this stuff to cook food, and buying food to eat.

Especially in these times with so many out of work.

Good luck Dutch NGO.
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Re: Dutch NGO Promotes Clean Smoke-Free Cooking

Post by SternAAlbifrons »

Go tell that to 10 million Cambodia housewives, Nuke.
I sure they will love you for telling them how it works, what they want, what what costs, what works best, and what is possible.

Please excuse my exasperation again, but you seem to constantly give opinions and advice about things you know absolutely zero.

That may be just fine in itself, Free Speech and all that..
- but it is exactly the attitude that eg, leads to billions of NGO and foreign aid money and efforts being wasted by Westerners with the arrogance to believe they know what is best - when in fact they no nothing, zip zero zot, about what they are talking about.

On the other hand - and this is what most bugs me here, Nuke - they are often the same ones who sneer at the genuine agents of positive change, those few foreign advisors who actually put in the bootwork to understand. Like you just did.

ps, Piousness is not humility.
Last edited by SternAAlbifrons on Sun Oct 04, 2020 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Dutch NGO Promotes Clean Smoke-Free Cooking

Post by mehfisto »

SternAAlbifrons wrote: Sun Oct 04, 2020 2:10 am Great initiative.
Maybe they can start at the beginning - with those plastic bag firestarters.
How I wish they would ban those polystyrene boxes people use for pork and rice. Which is environmentally worse, plastic or polystyrene?
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Re: Dutch NGO Promotes Clean Smoke-Free Cooking

Post by SternAAlbifrons »

Polystyrene is much worse, i believe, but this is not my field.

I do know that banana leaves and other beautiful stuff worked perfectly for millions of Balinese until ten years after i first went there.
only part of the solution these days, but it should be at least that. Check the streets.
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Re: Dutch NGO Promotes Clean Smoke-Free Cooking

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HOW COOKSTOVE SMOKE AFFECTS OUR HEALTH
Cambodianess 24/10/2020 11:46 AM
Image
Mrs. Ung Samuth, 57, is the Village Chief of Prey Preal village, in Kliang Meas commune, Bovel district, Battambang province
“Never before did I realize that smoke from cooking is so harmful to our health. I learned that one hour of cooking on wood is equivalent of smoking one cigarette. We need to take action.” said the Village Chief Mrs. Ung Samuth.

Around 3 billion people globally cook on polluting open fires or simple stoves fuelled by kerosene, biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste) and coal. Wood pollutes the air in kitchen areas, so the cooks, and their children, risk severe respiratory diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Mrs Samuth is married and has four children and two grandchildren. Her husband as a farmer living in another province to look after their corn plantation. She was invited to SNV’s Training of Trainers event in Bevel district to understand better about the consequences of household air pollution using traditional cookstoves, and to further extend her knowledge and bring solutions to her village people.

In Cambodia, there are around 2.5 million families still using traditional cookstoves with solid biomass such as wood, charcoal, and agricultural waste. WHO estimates around 11,000 people in Cambodia died prematurely per year due to household air pollution; poor health condition also increases vulnerability to COVID-19.

Samuth’s family was using the traditional Lao stove with considerable time spend– the hardest part is to collect wood. “I am very busy with my work; yet cooking is taking at least three hours of my time each day. Especially when my husband is living far away; we have fetch wood. Yet, now wood is also rare to find and even harder in the rainy season,” said Samuth.
https://cambodianess.com/article/how-co ... our-health
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Re: Dutch NGO Promotes Clean Smoke-Free Cooking

Post by CEOCambodiaNews »

‘Smoke Free Village’ project starts in Kampong Speu
Long Kimmarita | Publication date 01 April 2021 | 22:03 ICT

Preah Khe is one of the communes in Kampong Speu province that has successfully implemented its lavatory programme, ensuring that 100 per cent of households there have a toilet with no one suffering the inconvenience of defecating in an open area as was too often the case prior to a modernisation campaign undertaken by the local authorities.

Having achieved this fundamental improvement to their community and thereby raising their collective standard of living, the residents of the commune – located in Baset district about 100km from Phnom Penh – are now joining together in a new modernising campaign that aims to create a “Smoke Free Village” by reducing the use of traditional cooking stoves.

Stoves that burn wood create a great deal of smoke that negatively affects the environment of the village and the health of the villagers.

By joining the “Smoke Free Village” campaign, villagers have committed to changing their behaviours in four big ways to make their villages more closely resemble a model village for the entire country, thereby reducing emissions that contribute to climate change as just one of the campaign’s many benefits.

The four behaviours that people have committed to changing are – keep children away from smoke, cook only in a well-ventilated kitchen, always use well-dried firewood and always use a smoke-free cooking stove.
https://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/ ... mpong-speu
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