Argentina

From Solar Cooking

1 News and Recent Developments
2 Climate, Culture, and Special Considerations
3 Documents
4 Contacts
5 See Also

[edit] News and Recent Developments

July 2003: Proyecto Fertil is a small community improvement project in the town of Salsipuedes, Argentina. On the surface, the project aims to help low-income families by teaching solar cooking and advanced gardening skills. As one organizer put it, the larger goal is to create a community "network that sustains us and contains all of us, where responsibility, perseverance, the work and the protagonism of each person is fundamental." Proyecto Fertil, which is funded by Fondo CAMPER of the island of Mallorca, Spain, "seeks to generate food and energy savings, but, above all ... the establishment of a new social framework [involving] the promotion of values, a productivity in which resources flourish and self-esteem is reinforced, a harmonious contact with nature, and cooperative interpersonal relations." The solar cooking portion of the project energized the community to rally around those values. The project began with the selection of 20 representative families to receive gardening and solar cooking assistance while committing to help spread skills to other community members. Each family was required to send at least two members to the week of training activities, which was led by Manolo Vilchez of Fundación Tierra of Barcelona, Spain. Twenty SK-series parabolic solar cookers, designed by Dr. Dieter Seifert of Germany and paid for by Fondo CAMPER, were shipped to Salsipuedes, and Manolo led the community in assembling them, five or six per day. Each day also included lessons in using the powerful cookers, safety measures and related concerns. Spontaneous enthusiasm sparked a group of participants to gather recycled materials and use them to build a cooker that could bake a loaf of bread in 1 hour and 40 minutes. Finally, 20 new solar cooks prepared 16 different kinds of food in a large cooking demonstration in the streets of Salsipuedes. The solar cooking activities drew large crowds of people from far away, and according to one project leader, the project's next meeting was the most energized in its history. "To maintain this sentiment of readiness, hope, unity, solidarity and production is our task from now forward," another organizer added. Organizers of Proyecto Fertil will continue helping people master solar cooking and expanding the project. Contact: Fundación Tierra

[edit] Climate, Culture, and Special Considerations

Argentina has a large distribution of latitudes from 23 to 55 South, providing a large area which is highly suitiable for solar cooking. The main centres active in solar cooking are:

INENCO: Institute for Non Conventional Energy, National University of Salta
CRICYT: Regional Research Centre for Science and Technology, Mendoza

There are also activities in the University of San Juan, University of Buenos Aires, and many other Universities and NGOs.

[edit] Documents

[edit] Reports

[edit] Articles in the media

[edit] Web pages

IAA-UNT Instituto de Acondicionamiento Ambiental (Institute of Environmental Control) School of Architecture, National University of Tucumán. Solar cookers dissemination since 2000, developed in a 1999 project with the Brace Research Institut, University of Mc Gill, Canada.