Not-yet-fossil fuel.

• Author: Chege, Nancy
• Position: Depletion of wood due to use as fuel

In 1975, in the wake of the oil price shock, another - less publicized - energy crisis was "unveiled." In much of the developing world, experts had discovered what millions of villagers already knew: Fuelwood, the most widely used Third World fuel, was getting harder to find. People were gathering wood for their fires more quickly than it could grow back. In Sudan, wood was being burned 70 percent faster than replacement trees were growing. In Ethiopia, it was going up in smoke 150 percent faster. Among environmentalists, the perception became widespread that village cooking fires were consuming the globe's forests.

After further study, analysts realized the initial alarm had been mistaken - and that firewood demand was a minor cause of deforestation. People were mostly using twigs and dead branches for fuel, leaving trees standing. The main perpetrators of deforestation were not women preparing for the evening meal, but farmers clearing land for crops and livestock. To this day, however, the belief persists that fuelwood scarcity drives deforestation. That popular misconception has hampered efforts to address serious fuelwood problems that do exist. While not quite deforesting the globe, these problems are undermining the well-being of hundreds of millions of people on at least two continents.

Biomass, including wood, other plant matter, and animal wastes, provides 14 percent of the world's primary energy. It is the principal fuel of at least 2 billion people, a majority of them in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian sub-continent. In countries such as Ethiopia and Nepal, biomass provides 90 percent of the total energy consumed. An estimated 80 percent of the biomass energy is used in homes for cooking and heating.

Until recently, most biomass consumers lived in rural areas. As populations have grown, and the number of trees has diminished, searching for fuelwood has indeed become a demanding task. In some areas of Nepal, for example, collecting firewood was a two-hour task only a generation ago, yet today it is almost an entire day's expedition - every day. That constitutes an enormous erosion of productivity in other kinds of work. And the problem is worsening rapidly: a study by the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) forecasts that while 1.3 billion people were short of firewood in 1980, the number will rise to 2.7 billion by the turn of the century. Although the FAO study has a few shortcomings, its conclusions are widely...