Africa presents one of the biggest challenges for ecology. Its extreme environmental conditions and technology gap with the rest of the world means it is a laboratory par excellence for experimenting with new solutions on the theme of eco-sustainability. A frontier land in which one has to create a precarious balance between subsistence farming and that of the technologically-advanced western world.

Yes, because our non-sustainable model of agriculture cannot be exported to Africa on a large scale because there simply isn’t the means or the infrastructure. Is this a disadvantage or a piece of luck, seeing as the western model is hyper-productive, both in terms of actual produce and pollution: although we can calculate that, today, the quantity of wheat per man-hour produced by an American farmer is 350 times greater than that harvested by a Cherokee peasant, this proportion is not quantifiable in terms of environmental impact (fertilizers, pesticides) and the destruction of non-renewable energy.

For Africa, the critical point is demographic increase. Rural African economies get their energy from wood, the depletion of woodland and forests, together with the pollution produced by combustion is becoming an ever-greater emergency. 94% of the rural population and 73% of the urban population of Sub-Saharan Africa use wood or wood-based charcoal as the main source of energy for cooking and heating.

Every year the 650 million inhabitants south of the Sahara burn 470 million tonnes of bio-mass (0.7 tonnes per head). Chopping this much wood means the forests recede and the desert advances. In addition to being an environmental crisis, there are also health issues: bio-mass combustion produces a huge quantity of pollutants, especially when it takes place inside the home, resulting in lethal ‘indoor pollution? is produced.

Every year 400,000 people die in Sub-Saharan Africa due to the polluted air they breathe from burning bio-mass fuels.