Health risks of cooking smoke as bad as Aids

Methods of cooking in the Third World are causing a greater health crisis even than Aids, and costing the world up to three-quarters of a trillion dollars every year, a United Nations programme revealed during the Earth Summit late last week.

Smoke trapped inside homes from cooking wood and dung kills 2.2 million people a year – mainly women and children – and is responsible for 5 per cent of the total burden of disease worldwide, said the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep).

With governments themselves unlikely to approve ambitious targets for bringing clean renewable energy to the poor, Unep is searching – along with Ted Turner's United Nations Foundation – for "barefoot entrepreneurs" to do the job instead.

Two billion people, or a third of the world's population, cannot get electricity or any form of modern energy: in countries such as Sierra Leone, Uganda and Malawi, 95 per cent of the people lack such power resources. Instead they have to gather wood and dung, often walking for hours every day carrying backbreaking loads, and robbing the land of tree cover and fertility in the process.

Burning the wood and dung gives off smoke that contains a cocktail of poisonous chemicals likely to cause respiratory and heart disease. Unep estimates that this activity costs the world between $150bn (£102bn) and $750bn a year, mainly in lost production through sickness and death. It amounts to "0.5 to 2.5 per cent of the world's GNP".

Aids kills more people, about three million a year worldwide, but despite its massive impact the virus is believed to cause less widespread illness.

Dr Klaus Töpfer, Unep's executive director, said: "The economic burden of this pollution is staggering, and it is one of the leading causes of childhood and infant mortality. Development in the rural areas of developing countries is vitally linked to energy."

Yet the number of people without electricity is expanding as population growth outpaces connections to the grid, Unep reports. It notes that it is very expensive to produce electricity in large plants and then distribute it to thousands of villages throughout a nation.

Yet poor countries are generally sunny and often windy – ideal candidates for renewable energy. And as renewable sources come free from nature, villages would be able to generate their own supplies without needing the grid, if they had the necessary technology and knowledge.

Last year a taskforce, set up by the G8 leaders on Tony Blair's initiative, proposed recommendations to bring renewable energy to 800 million poor people by the end of the decade. But the plan quickly died in preparatory negotiations, and it is doubtful whether the summit will agree any concrete targets for increasing it at all.

Instead the United Nations Foundation and Unep are trying to achieve change by starting at grassroots level. And they have now provided more than $6m to provide small loans to "barefoot entrepreneurs" in Africa and in Brazil.

Last week the two organisations announced that they were making another $2m available to expand the work into China. Here the project will start in the remote Yunnan province, which borders Tibet, where the collection of fuelwood is stripping the land of cover, and leading to the rains running rapidly off the land and causing flooding downstream.