The shortage of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in Cameroon's major cities has forced city dwellers to use firewood again to cook food. This is not good news for the environment, especially during the UN climate conference.
According to a mid-November interview with Deutsche Welle, many people were trying to find full gas cylinders on a recent night in Cameroon's capital, Yaoundé.
Since Cameroon began producing natural gas in 2018, it has been processing some of it to supply the domestic market for LPG.
But its refinery produces about 34,000 metric tons per year, enough to meet only one-fifth of its domestic gas demand of about 150,000 metric tons per year.
The government has said it plans to import 120,000 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas this year, but so far this has failed to solve the current gas shortage.
"I ran out of gas, so I called my supplier to ask him to bring a bottle, but his gas storage was also out," said a woman with an air cylinder on her head. She added that she was now trying to find a place where replacement bottles could be sold, but none of the distribution points she had visited were gone. This has become a common complaint in many parts of Cameroon.
At present, the exact cause of the shortage of natural gas in Cameroon is unknown. Local media blamed it on import difficulties and speculation by gas retailers who hoarded bottles to sell at prices higher than the upper limit set by the government.
Cylinders filled with liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) are the most popular fuel source for cooking food in Yaoundé and Douala, Cameroon's largest city. In both cities, 63% of households used gas for cooking in the latest year (2017) for which data are available.
Some suppliers, in the face of shortages, are resorting to unscrupulous ways to make money. "I went to buy a bottle of gasoline and thought it was full," Collins Suh, of Yaoundé, who carried the cylinder on a motorcycle, told DW. "But when I tried to shake it, I found water escaping from a small hole. The supplier sold the gasoline mixed with water to people.
Thanks to an ambitious government master plan, the use of gas used for cooking has grown rapidly over the past few years, especially in urban areas of Cameroon. When the government launched it in 2016, it aimed to more than triple the use of liquefied petroleum gas and have 58% of households in Cameroon cook food with natural gas by 2030.
Now, in Cameroon, people are using traditional wood as fuel to process food, and a small number of people are also using charcoal. In comparison, burning wood produces about five times more carbon emissions than LPG per unit of cooking heat transported. "Due to the shortage of gas, I had to prepare Jolov rice in a charcoal pot," said a local woman.
Environmentalist Forbeseh Philip is concerned. "This is not good news for the environment," he said in Douala. Although fewer people use wood in Cameroon than in other parts of Africa, if urban dwellers resume using wood, "it means more wood flows from rural to urban areas," he said.
Cameroon's Congo Basin is home to the world's second-largest rainforest region after the Amazon, and wood-fueled logging has become one of the main causes of deforestation in Cameroon.