Third World’s place in the sun

Press, 19 April 1979, Page 19

Third World’s place in the sun

By

ANNETTE VON BROECKER,

NZPA-Reutcr

The farmer goes to his sola r-energy powered, plastic greenhouse, picks up some vegetables, and returns home where his wife prepares the meal in a bio-gas cooker. While she cooks, the children follow a school programme on a solarenergy powered television set. Water runs from a solar pump into the village household. The same pump waters the fields and fills the cattle troughs.

The dung from the cattle and the waste from crops and vegetables fuel the bio-gas cooker, in which methane gas is produced by a natural process of fermentation. The scene is the self-

sufficient “solar village" of tomorrow — anywhere in Asia, Latin America, or Africa, where hundreds of

millions of people Still hover between hunger and starvation.

The plan was discussed at a recent four-day congress in the north Italian town of Verese. About 280 delegates from 71 Third World nations came at the invitation of the European Economic Community. After lengthy discussion they concluded that the vision could become reality.

Entitled “Solar Energy for Development,” it set out a programme for the use of solar energy in the many rural areas of the Third World where electricity is still a dream. The oil crisis, which is hitting the developing nations hardest, and increasing doubts about the feasibility of nuclear energy, have given a new boost to the research and

development of alternative energy sbuces. “Energy is the basis for any progress in the world,” Albert Strup. of the E.E.C. energy department, said. More than 1500 M people in Africa, Asia and Latin America still depend on wood and dung as their main fuel suppliers. They chop down trees and bushes, and as populations expand, large inhabited areas turn into deserts. This trend has reached catastrophic proportions, for example, in the Sahel region of West Africa. As the rural environment changes, hundreds of thousands of people are forced to abandon their

villages and take refuge in the already overcrowded cities. “But, with the help of the self-contained solar energy stations, life in the village can be improved,’’ Mr Strup says. “The sun is free and available in abundance in most of the Third World countries. It should be used.” The idea is not new; most of the developing countries have already completed more or less successful experiments. But so far there has been little co-ordination. “Now we must put all our experience together and perhaps soon we will have the solar village of tomorrow,” an Indian

energy expert said. Television sets for educational programmes are already powered by solar cells with great success in Niger and the Ivory Coast. Niger and Zaire also use solar energy for their national telephone grids. In India, a factory and a hotel receive almost half of their power supply from the sun. Plastic greenhouses operate in the Jordan Valley; large stills have been built in Tunisia and Pakistan; solar crop dryers are being tested in the Philippines and Brazil. More than a million biogas cookers run successfully in China, and solar refrigerators and cooling systems are being tested in Africa for the preservation of quickly rotting agricultural and fish products, as well as for medical supplies such as blood plasma. Peasants in southern Peru use solar cookers — a combination of Inca clay stoves and modern solar' energy generators. Often the most sophisticated equipment is tape ‘-d from the industrial-

ised countries at considerable expense. But in many cases such equipment, still in an experimental stage, broke down afer a short time, the conference was told. Mexico imported 17 solar water pumps from Europe, of which only one is still in use.

This kind of experience has caused suspicion among some developing countries that the industrialised nations are using them as “guinea pigs” for new technology. “We were also told by some delegates that the Western world only wants to encourage the Third World to concentrate on solar energy so that they can have all the remaining oil io themselves,” the conference president, Mr G. Schuster, said. “It will take some time to dismantle this distrust.” Some conference delegates, brochures from big companies under their arms, said that competition among Western nations for their new solar energy products was already in full swing.