Two satisfied customers pose next to a solar cooker in Purmamarca. Credit: Courtesy of EcoAndina

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 21 2013 (IPS)

It’s carnival time in sunny northwest Argentina, and as usual, food vending carts are everywhere. But some of the carts are different this year: they offer food cooked on the spot – by the sun.

During carnival festivities in the Andean highland region of La Puna, which last almost the whole month of February, local promoters of solar power have introduced a fleet of innovative mobile “solar kiosks” in Tilcara, Humahuaca, La Quiaca, Purmamarca and Uquía, popular tourist destinations in the northern Argentine province of Jujuy.

Each kiosk consists of a cart with wheels and a waterproof roof, equipped with a solar-powered parabolic cooker that is essentially a large, curved aluminium dish, resembling a satellite dish, with brackets in the middle to hold the recipients where the food is cooked.We want it to be a healthy alternative. We don’t want it to end up in the hands of any old vendor who will use it to sell hot dogs and French fries.

“People are sceptical at first, but once they try it, they are amazed,” said Marta Rojas, who runs a solar kiosk inaugurated this month in Tilcara, the picturesque old city that is the epicentre of carnival festivities. “They need to touch the dish to believe it, and they end up burning themselves,” she laughed.

The carts are also equipped with a two-kilo tank of propane gas for cooking at night or on overcast days, a water dispenser, a cooler, advertising signs and kitchen utensils.

The driving force behind the initiative is the EcoAndina Foundation, which has been working for the last 25 years on the development of various devices to take advantage of the abundant sunlight in this arid region, where water and vegetation are scarce and swings in temperature between day and night are extreme.

Rojas, a schoolteacher, took one of the solar-powered cooking courses offered by EcoAndina and decided to take the plunge and run a food cart during carnival season. The foundation provides the carts at a subsidised price, because showing them in action is much more effective than simply displaying them, she told IPS.

“So far we’ve made vegetarian pizza and quinoa turnovers. We’ve attracted a lot of vegetarian tourists, who take pamphlets with them,” she said. “But we’ve also roasted a kid goat with potatoes,” she added for the benefit of meat lovers.

The region of La Puna, in northwest Jujuy, is one of the areas that receive the most solar radiation annually in the world, along with the neighbouring Bolivian Altiplano – which forms part of the same ecoregion – and the high plains of Tibet and Afghanistan.

That makes it an ideal “laboratory” for experimenting with solar energy. So far, EcoAndina has installed around 900 solar energy units that are designed and assembled locally, including stoves and ovens for individual households and community kitchens, heaters and hot-water tanks, in more than 30 isolated towns in the region.

Their efforts are backed by technical and financial support from the German embassy in Argentina and the German NGO Wisions, and are aimed at promoting sustainable development and employment through this clean, renewable energy source.

Industrial design specialist Virginia Bauso is the inventor of the solar kiosks. Two years ago, she and her colleagues set out to promote solar power in Tilcara with a group who demonstrated how to make grilled sandwiches using the sun’s energy. “It was a success,” she told IPS.

This led to the idea of designing a mobile food cart equipped with a solar cooker. “Since it is mainly women who run small businesses here, we targeted our efforts to them. In 2011 we started out with prototype carts, courses and street demonstrations,” she said.

Since the beginning of 2013, a dozen carts have been launched in a number of different towns, taking advantage of the influx of Argentine and foreign tourists who come to take part in the area’s carnival festivities, a unique blend of indigenous, Spanish and locally developed myths and traditions.

“We want it to be a healthy alternative. We don’t want it to end up in the hands of any old vendor who will use it to sell hot dogs and French fries. We make vegetable and quinoa stew, corn and onion tacos, things like that,” said Bauso.

To drink, every solar kiosk offers hot or cold coca leaf tea, with lemon, cinnamon and sugar, which helps to alleviate “apunamiento” or altitude sickness, a common complaint since the region is between 2,700 and 4,600 metres above sea level.

The women who run the food carts take advantage of the morning sun to cook with the highest power level available. It takes about 12 minutes to boil a litre of water.

The aluminium parabolic reflector, which measures 1.2 metres in diameter, “can be a bit tricky to use,” said Bauso. It needs to be properly focused towards the sun and then gently moved away, or covered with a diffuser, to raise and lower the cooking temperature.

Cast iron recipients work best for cooking, although aluminium can also be used. “The women generally prefer to bring their own pots and pans,” she added.

At night or on cloudy days, food that has not been prepared in advance is cooked with propane gas.

Every one of the kiosks serves as a “live” demonstration for the promotion of solar power, which is why each one also offers brochures printed up by EcoAndina.

In this way, an alternative energy source that has been quietly developing in a handful of isolated towns in La Puna is becoming known in the rest of the country.

This has led to expressions of interest from other provinces in Argentina, but Bauso believes that wide-scale expansion is still premature.

“We still need to work on the cookers. We are putting together an instruction manual. We also don’t want just anyone to use them. We want them to be used by people who are genuinely interested in solar power, and in healthier, safer and more hygienic cooking,” she said.

Argentina, a country with significant oil and natural gas reserves, also has enormous potential for the development of solar and wind power, which currently account for only 1.1 percent of energy production.

And there is no lack of a need for alternative energy sources, especially in poor and isolated areas.

“Many people in towns in the interior are interested in this technology because piped gas service doesn’t reach rural areas, bottled gas is expensive, and firewood is in ever shorter supply, which also reflects the growing problem of desertification,” explained Bauso.

People in the arid region of La Puna have traditionally used three types of plants for firewood: the “tola” bush (Parastrephia lepidophylla), “queñoa” (Polylepis tarapacana), a high-altitude tree, and “yareta” (Azorella compacta), a cushion-shaped evergreen shrub. But these plants, which are also eaten by llamas, are becoming increasingly scarce, and people have to travel ever longer distances to find them.

Studies by EcoAndina show that one solar cooker reduces household firewood consumption by 50 to 70 percent. This is why they are catching on in an area where “sunshine is one thing that people have more than enough of.”

And their use is even beginning to be passed down from generation to generation. “People are buying solar cookers from us to give to their children as wedding presents,” reported Bauso.

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the World Bank.

A transnational pesticides manufacturer is sponsoring the Vila Isabel samba school, which won the main contest in Rio de Janeiro’s carnival this year, raising questions about financing mechanisms for “the greatest show on earth”, as carnival is described in Brazil.

No expenses spared: rehearsal of a carnival show paying homage to Brazil’s small farmers. Credit: Official web site for Scuola de Samba Vila Isabel

The five-million-dollar contribution from the German corporation BASF that helped the Grêmio Recreativo Escola de Samba Unidos de Vila Isabel to victory had already been criticised before the parade by the Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) and other social organisations that make up the Permanent Campaign Against Agrochemicals and For Life.

“We deeply regret the opportunism shown by BASF in using the Vila Isabel samba school in order to promote itself,” João Pedro Stédile, a historic leader of the MST, told IPS.

Rosa Magalhães, the creator of the “samba-enredo” (theme song) of Vila Isabel, tried to minimise the criticisms, calling the controversy the result of the samba school being selected by the judges as the best of 12 participating in the final parade through the Marquês de Sapucaí Sambódromo, a stadium built in Rio de Janeiro specially for carnival parades.

The Vila Isabel samba school was judged the most creative, most organised and most rhythmic, and having the best costumes and the best music in this year’s traditional carnival festival held Feb. 10-12.

Its leaders say the controversy over the sponsorship, which caused upsets in the days prior to the parade, is a thing of the past.

“BASF united the greatest shows on earth: carnival and agriculture,” the company trumpeted in a communiqué referring to the winning samba-theme lyrics: “La Vila sings to Brazil, the world’s granary: add water to the beans, for we have another guest…” which are about life and work in the rural areas of the country.

“None of this would be possible without the partnership with BASF, who, like us, believed in the idea from the outset and made every effort to contribute to this carnival victory,” said Vila Isabel’s president, Wilson da Silva, better known as Moisés.

BASF’s Crop Protection Division described the firm, in a communiqué sent to IPS, as “a leader in the defence of agriculture and a strong ally of agribusiness, offering well-established and innovative fungicides, insecticides and herbicides.”

But spokespersons for the Permanent Campaign Against Agrochemicals and For Life said rather that it is “the third largest company for toxic agrochemical sales in our country over the last five years”.

Toxic chemicals used in agriculture are responsible for the deaths of 10,000 Brazilians a year and poison at least 25,000 small farmers, says the Permanent Campaign, citing Health Ministry figures.

The news of Vila Isabel’s victory coincided with information from the Superior Labour Court on a dispute between BASF and the Anglo-Dutch company Shell, and victims of pollution in 2002 from a pesticide factory in Paulínia, a rural municipality in the southern state of São Paulo.

According to the toxicology report presented to the court, pesticides polluted groundwater and soil throughout the region, affecting more than 1,000 people and directly causing 62 fatalities.

“We were saved by the genius of Martinho da Vila (one of the composers of Vila Isabel’s music this year), who wrote a spectacular samba focused on different agricultural activities, and avoided a lament on agribusiness,” Stédile said.

“The singing was great, and so was the choreography; and BASF was unable to profit from its subliminal propaganda because the people in the sambódromo and the television audience had no way of linking the parade with agribusiness, and less so with toxic pesticides,” he said.

The poisonous fumes may not have remained in the air at the sambódromo, but there was a discussion that is repeated every year about the financing of Rio’s sumptuous carnival, which costs at least five million dollars for each of the competing samba schools, all striving not to be relegated to the “second division” of the contest.

Part of the festival is financed by television broadcast rights, ticket sales for the sambódromo, and a contribution from the Rio de Janeiro city government. But there are never enough resources for a carnival that is now considered a “professional” show.

What publicist Carlos Perrone, a promotor of “carnival marketing”, calls the “corporate carnival” comes into play when financial support is needed.

A report by the state TV Brasil indicates that this year alone, eight out of the 12 samba schools participating in the Special Group received corporate sponsorship.

Sponsors include a spectrum of celebrities, municipal governments from the interior of the country, German and Korean companies and even a horse breeders’ association, as well as BASF.

“The problem with sponsorship is that one has to praise everything about the sponsor as it if were all marvellous, whereas in reality some things are good and some are bad,” Milton Cunha, a carnival artist, said in an interview on TV Brasil.

Marcelo Freixo, a state legislator for the Socialism and Freedom Party, has made himself unpopular with the samba schools for questioning the financing mechanisms.

In an interview with IPS, Freixo, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Rio de Janeiro, said he is not against the carnival heritage, but thinks the mayor’s offices should finance themes with “cultural returns”, which “does not prevent private sponsorship for each school”.

Freixo would like to open a “wide public debate” on these untouchable representatives of the most internationally famous form of Rio culture, and to this end he praised the solution achieved by the samba school sponsored by BASF.

“The songwriters were skillful enough not to create propaganda for agribusiness, let alone for toxic pesticides. That cannot have been easy for them, but as they are excellent artists they managed to go down another road. La Vila’s parade was really beautiful,” he said.

Up to about two decades ago, the carnival parade was financed almost entirely by mafias running illegal gambling on the “jogo do bicho” (numbers game). “Bicheiros”, or heads of such mafias, have even been arrested in full view on the sambódromo parade ground.

This is why many see private and public financing as a far preferable solution for funding the carnival.

“Illegal financing should not even be countenanced. If it is illegal, it is illegal, and that’s that,” said Freixo.

Now the carnival is over for another year, and preparations for next year’s begin. Meanwhile, sponsors are already deciding what chances different samba schools have of winning the coveted first place in the Marquês de Sapucaí sambódromo in 2014.

(END)