Dear Jan and AD I agree with the standard of living and $2 per day. The number is often used to raise funds to help people. It sounds like very little when a Starbucks Fairtrade coffee is $4.
It is more important when assessing the cost of a stove (apart from all the good things Cecil pointed out) to know what the opportunity cost is for the better stove. What else can be purchased with the money. $2 goes a long way in China. There are people living in Northern Namibia who barely know what money is, let alone earn any. One of the four babies in the recent movie "Babies" is from that group. They got along fine for thousands of years without any. Something quite different to watch for is raw material availability. Proposing that a stove be improved by using twice as much metal (to make skirts and stove bodies) may be using up a small local supply of second hand materials. Whatever the cost, there is simply not enough material in some communities. Mali is a good example. Roger Samson has been teaching stove making in SE Senegal (and found a wife there!) and there is a similar limitation. Production is limited by the number of scrap refrigerators they can find because that is the source of metal. To bring in new metal to make enough stoves to 'solve the problem' means addressing the issues of importing and delivering substantial quantities of new raw material. One approach which I hope to try this year is importing components instead of raw material, where those components are prepared under lost cost conditions near the source of supply. Ashok Gadgil is doing this in Darfur, being able overcome the lack of skills on the ground in the target area, the efficiency of production of flat parts (in India) and the cost of Indian steel. Instead of shipping 'scrap' along with un-proceeds parts (in other words, flat sheets) they only send the parts (flat) which is transport-efficient and externalises all the accuracy, design drift and tooling issues. His project can in theory be scaled to solve the entire problem whereas depending on local scrap cannot is nearly every location I can think of. It is an interesting challenge. Regards Crispin +++++++ Dear Jan, In the part of India where I live, a person earning US$ 2 per day would not be considered all that poor. He would not be able to support a family on that earning but if he were leading a bachelor's life in a village, he can live comfortably on that money. The field assistants in our own institute earn a salary of about US$60 per month. They are farmers' sons. So they have a roof on their heads and get enough to eat. The salary that they earn is spent on flashy clothing, cinema, a mobile phone etc. It is the exchange rate between the Indian Rupee and the US$ that makes us so poor in the eyes of the world. I myself, who headed the Institute till my retirement last month, earned a monthly salary of only US$350, and yet I belonged to the richest 3% of the country (that is the percentage of people who pay income tax). Yours A.D.Karve _______________________________________________ Stoves mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site: http://www.bioenergylists.org/
