For years, House Professor Garrick Blalock has battled the environmentally unfriendly three-stone stove in East Africa. But something has prevented a seemingly provocative shift toward the efficiency and health that alternative stoves offer. While the lack of infrastructure behind the alternative stoves is likely an important factor, I believe it really has to do with the timescale of the benefits offered by the stoves.
Environmentally friendly products are expensive, but we have several ways to manage their cost. We can offer financing. We can offer insurance to subsidize the cost of accidents. We even have warranties that can fix or replace the product at no expense. All of this forms an infrastructure which supports expensive investments in environmentally friendly products. This type of infrastructure is largely absent in East Africa. For that reason, it is very difficult to introduce relatively expensive, environmentally friendly cook stove products into these regions.
However, even when the cost of a healthy stove is practically reduced to zero, families almost always revert back to their original three-stone stove. This issue seems beyond financing. Even when the health benefits are many and the cost is none, the families in this region choose their traditional option over seemingly pure benefits.
So then my question is, is it really that simple? Clearly the benefits of using the environmentally friendly stove do not outweigh the costs. So what are the costs that we aren’t seeing?
Perhaps the issue is in terms of timescale. Similar to the talk given by Prof. Sachs, the environment operates on a much larger timescale, and that can differentiate between imminent, tangible, humorous events and long-term, intangible, intrinsically non-humorous events. Maybe the timescale of health is related. Maybe the benefits of using the alternative stoves are on a timescale that is too drawn out to be noticed by these families. When the benefits were presented in the talk, time was not a factor. However, when each is made a function of time, the cost of adopting a new twist to an essential activity becomes concentrated and could far outweigh the diluted benefits that would slowly be introduced over the course of YEARS!
When time is introduced, it seems to me much more understandable that the environmentally friendly stoves have not been adopted.
I am curious as to whether or not a policy-based approach would work. This market-based approach seemed to fail for a number of reasons: cost, maintenance, etc. If the government could provide (or subsidize the purchase of) these stoves, I think that large scale adoption could be possible. Of course, funding would be the issue. What are your thoughts?
I totally think that the infrastructure/policy based approach would be the first step of trying to introduce the new stoves. But what makes me think that it wouldn’t be the final step is that Prof. Blalock mentioned he implemented an extensive funding plan that allowed families to try the stove basically for free, yet nearly all of them went back to the traditional stove. So if the policy revolved around subsidies, I’d expect a similar result from such a similar plan, ya know? Is that the kind of policy that you were thinking of?