Millets Revolution
Context:
- The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has declared 2023 to be the International Year of Millets (FAO). Millets are special in terms of agronomy and nutrition since they are full of protein, dietary fibre, minerals, and antioxidants (drought-resistant and suitable for semi-arid regions).
Obstacles to millet consumption:
- Around the world, millets, a varied genus of small-seeded grasses, are frequently grown as cereal grains or crops for human and animal nutrition.
- There are two types of millets grown in India.
- Important millets include sorghum, finger millet, and pearl millet.
- Minor millets include varieties including foxtail, small millet, kodo, proso, and barnyard millet.
- Overall, the Public Distribution System (PDS), the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), and school meals consumed over 54 million tonnes of grains in 2019–20. If 20% of the existing supply of rice and wheat were to be replaced by millet, the state would need to buy 10.8 million tonnes of millet.
- Millets could only be included in the PDS if more than 50% of production was acquired, which is an unlikely scenario. The central pool’s supply of millets are presently comparatively little, and they are only obtained from a small number of States. Compared to 33 million tonnes of rice and 31 million tonnes of wheat, there were only 4 lakh tonnes of nutritious cereals in central stocks in May 2022.
The actual problems are as follows:
- reduction in the millet-growing area
- Millets don’t produce much.
- Over the past ten years, production of other millets, particularly finger millet (ragi), has fallen or stagnated, as has production of sorghum (jowar), pearl millet (bajra), and ragi. Productivity has somewhat increased in jowar and bajra. If yield and production are not greatly increased, all encouragements to eat millets will be ineffective.
- Next, we look at some lessons learned from the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation’s (MSSRF(a)) experience maintaining millet biodiversity and promoting millet production and consumption in the Kolli hills of Tamil Nadu.
- The Kolli Hills are now different.
The millet project of the MSSRF has three objectives:
- to keep the variety of native millet crops growing, to promote millet output and consumption, and to boost farm income.
- The Kolli hills block of Namakkal district, the project region, is a distinctive physical and agro-ecological zone of the Eastern Ghats and is home to Scheduled Tribe groups with poor incomes. Minor millet production has drastically diminished as a result of reasons like low yields, and land use has switched toward more profitable crops.
- Women also handle the laborious and time-consuming task of millet processing. Additionally, very little grain was marketed and only a little amount was converted into value-added items.
Three interventions were made by the project:
- To boost production, agronomic breakthroughs, cutting-edge tools, and participatory varietal trials for better seeds are used. Community seed banks were established to preserve, revitalise, bolster, and improve local seed systems.
- There were also launched pulverizers and dehullers with specialised post-harvest technology. For an hour, women physically ground millet, yielding 2-4 kg of grain. When localised, small-scale mechanical milling, operated by self-help organisations, was introduced, everything changed.
- It was decided to form the Kolli Hills Agrobiodiversity Conservers’ Federation (KHABCOFED) to oversee all training and value-adding initiatives. Market ties were established, and the Kolli Hills Natural Foods trademark was applied to prepared foods.
- In this MSSRF project in Kolli Hills, the net revenues from value-added goods were five to ten times higher than those from grain: one kilogramme of tiny millet rice sold for $7, and one kilogramme of millet upma sells for $41. This shows that millet-based projects like this are viable.
- The biggest change over the past 25 years has been the reversal of the decline in the block-level area under cultivation of minor millets and finger millet, which has actually increased dramatically since 2014–15 even though the acreage is still only one-third of what it was in the early 2000s.
- Yields have increased as a result of the use of intercropping, better seeds, and agronomic methods. Growing millet now yields much higher earnings. The changeover from manual pounding has resulted in a reduction in women’s labour and an increase in millet consumption. There are more and more private mills with specialised pulverizers and dehullers.
The economy is the source of the issue:
- The most difficult outcomes to quantify are changes in intake and nutrition. People of all ages consumed millet nine days a month in 2021, according to a short sample study. Three-quarters of households ate millets on a regular basis, according to a previous study done fifteen years earlier. Accessibility plays a role in this, but so do changing eating habits.
- Increasing millet production and stopping the loss of arable land are both doable, but not easy. A range of initiatives, including scientific input, institutional frameworks, monetary incentives, and in-kind aid, are required to achieve this. The Indian government and state governments, particularly in Karnataka and Odisha, have initiated millet missions.
- These are great initiatives, but if we don’t take the millet industry’s economics into account, we’ll be competing with more profitable alternatives. Small farmers in mountainous regions and dryland plains, who are among the poorest households in rural India, will only produce millets if it provides them good returns.
Conclusion:
- If there was enough support from the public to make millet farming profitable and guarantee PDS supplies, a significant section of the population may potentially benefit from increased nutrition as a result.
