winning US actress Julia Roberts will join Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's drive to introduce 100 million clean cook stoves around the world by 2020, the State Department said Friday. Roberts and the chief US diplomat “will help to bring attention to the global issue that kills nearly two million people annually: toxic smoke from unsafe and inefficient cookstoves,” the State Department said in a statement. Roberts will serve as a global ambassador for the Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a public-private partnership led by the UN Foundation, which Clinton launched on September 21 in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. The World Health Organization considers dirty cooking smoke to be one of the five biggest dangers to health in developing countries, killing nearly two million people a year — twice the number dying from malaria. “Nearly two million people around the world —mostly women and children — die each year from an activity that many of us take for granted: cooking for our families,” Roberts was quoted as saying. “I am proud to stand with Secretary Clinton to work to reduce the senseless and preventable deaths from unsafe cooking conditions in the developing world,” Robert said. The State Department said the Alliance is a public-private partnership of more than 60 national governments, UN agencies, private companies and non-governmental organizations. They are “mobilized to help overcome the market barriers that currently impede the production, deployment, and use of clean cookstoves in the developing world,” it said.
