Haiti’s charcoal crisis comes into focus, but is anyone listening?

A year after Haiti’s terrible earthquake, freelance reporter William Wheeler, writing for Good Magazine, tells the story of how the country’s energy poverty crisis remains far from resolved.

From his account and that of others it is apparent that Haiti and scores of NGOs on the ground are still struggling to address the most basic needs of Haiti’s energy poor.

To be sure, a collapsed economy, a dysfunctional and transitional government, lack of coordination among public and private relief organizations and other not-for-profits, are major obstacles to getting the job done.

Let’s just hope that come January 2012 the people of Haiti will have more options when it comes to cooking their meals than three-rocks-and-a-pot fueled by charcoal made from the country’s last tree stands.

[Disclosure: The Charcoal Project was consulted and is quoted by the author.]

Haiti’s Dirty Habit: Can Smarter Stoves Heal Haiti?

The green Land Cruiser careens through side streets piled high with rubble, past garbage heaps and tarp cities stitched into the nooks and crannies of Port-au-Prince. Elizabeth Sipple points the driver down a dusty road to what looks like the middle of nowhere, then eases into her seat in the back and, as the urban anarchy recedes behind her, nods out the window. “There’s a big drug dealer who lived in this area,” she says. “This all used to be his land.” Now it’s a field filled with white tents—a relocation camp for thousands of the 1.3 million Haitians still homeless nearly a year after 2010’s January 12 earthquake. Green, mostly treeless hills rise into the distance.

Until the quake, many Americans knew Haiti mostly as a major hub for drugs headed to Miami. But Sipple, an agronomist who recently took a post as the director of International Lifeline Fund’s Haiti program, is working to wean the country off a more lethal addiction: wood and charcoal, which supply the majority of Haiti’s energy needs. The main source of revenue in the countryside is cutting trees for firewood and charcoal production—part of a hugely inefficient wood habit that consumes trees much more quickly than they can regenerate. This dependency has cost the country its forests, sapped its fertility, and set the stage for an increasing series of natural disasters, including—by driving migration into the congested, anarchically-constructed capital—the human impact of the earthquake that killed roughly a quarter of a million people.

Read the story on the Good Magazine website.