https://reasonstobecheerful.world/millets-making-comeback-india/
"In the last few years, farmers all over India have been going against the
grain (quite literally) to cultivate millets in a bid to protect their
livelihoods against the brutal impacts of climate change.
The term millets refers to a group of nutritionally dense ancient grains —
small seeded grass from the
Poaceae family — known to be hardy and
drought-resistant. They require much less water than many other crops,
including rice and wheat. Millets such as sorghum, kodo, pearl millet and
finger millet were staples in several parts of Africa and Asia, including
India, for many millennia.
Until they fell out of fashion, that is.
In an optimistic (but misguided) fit of policy making in the 1960s, the Indian
government promoted high-yielding varieties of grains like rice and wheat,
along with regular use of pesticides and fertilizers. Known as the Green
Revolution, this social project aimed to alleviate hunger and poverty by
rapidly increasing agricultural produce in the newly independent country.
However, this also meant that many native crops, including millets, disappeared
from the fields, replaced by quick and easy cash crops. This, in turn, led to a
loss of agricultural biodiversity over time. (It also brought about social and
economic inequity, as highlighted by the recent farmer protests in north
India.) Within a single generation, millets came to be considered culturally
unacceptable, denigrated as poor man’s food, consumed only in rural areas and
by people who worked physically demanding jobs.
Recently though, there has been a government-led, widespread stimulus for both
the cultivation and consumption of millets across the country. This campaign
reached its crescendo last year when the United Nations declared 2023 the
International Year of Millets, with the objective of increasing awareness about
the sustainable nature of millet farming as well as their nutritional
superiority.
“Millets such as jowar (sorghum) and bajra (pearl millet) are typically C4
plants, which are efficient users of water and better at tolerating heat, as
compared to C3 plants such as wheat, rice, oats and barley,” says Amrita Hazra,
associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research
in Pune, and founder of The Millet Project, which experimented with introducing
millets to farms and plates in Northern California.
This, she explains, has a direct connection with the deepening climate crisis
that is causing erratic weather patterns across India, destroying crop yields
and leaving farmers debt-ridden. “As climate change predictions entail overall
higher global temperatures and more extreme conditions with regard to
availability of water,” Hazra says, “cultivating millets will introduce viable
alternatives and diversity to the cereal crops that we eat.” According to a
2021 study, a shift to millets could save India 50 million metric tons of
greenhouse gas emissions and 300 billion cubic meters of water each year."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
