Would you believe me if I told you that India’s own crop, Millets, could be dominating global supermarkets? Millets, better known as the “poor man’s crop”, has found itself in the centre of attention ever since the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization announced 2023 as the “International Year of the Millets” . In her budget presentation this year, Nirmala Sitaraman labelled this crop as the Shree Anna or mother of all grains expressing that she wants all Indians to eat millets.
- Watch Bill Gates cook a millets khichdi in this tweet by the Union Minister Smriti Irani
Interestingly, a small proportion of our population has always been producing and consuming millets. Many tribal communities along with small scale farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh have continued this traditional crop and are the unsung heroes behind its preservation to this day. They have continued to cultivate this crop despite unfavourable market conditions, lack of government support and lack of resources.
After the green revolution, many farmers shifted to wheat, rice and other commercial crops such as corn, soybean and eucalyptus to feed themselves and scale up their farms. Left behind were the handful of small scale farmers and tribal farm labourers who held onto the crop largely for self and community consumption.
Our farmers like most blue collar labourers are largely unorganised and face several issues. One of them being invisibilization which undermines their economic contribution. This makes it easier for middlemen, who are more educated and have access to markets, to piggyback on farmers’ produce and monopolise profits. We as consumers continue to pay inflated grocery prices and farmers continue to receive low fixed wages for their labour. In 2021, the average income for a small scale farmer in India was Rs. 6400 per month which is only marginally above the national minimum wage rate.
A further look at farm incomes in India shows that small scale farmers (with less than 1 hectare of land holding) have to look for income avenues outside of farming becoming wage labourers. This blurs the distinction between farmers and labourers. While this is true for all small scale farmers, millet cultivation is currently at a critical juncture which will determine its and the farmer’s future course.
So what’s this uproar about? Well, recent research shows that millets are our solution to many of the world’s food problems. Not only do they have a plethora of health benefits but they are also climate resilient and do not require the use of pesticides and insecticides. Owing to this, millets are being rebranded. From nutri-cereal labels to trending vegan recipe reels on instagram, millets will soon be on every urban dweller’s grocery list. This is already reflective in an increase in global demand and thereby millet exports from India in the last few years.
Following these market forces, such a rise in demand and yield should lead to a direct rise in farmer incomes! However, the data collected by Indian Data Insights reflects that harvesting millets remains expensive and has incurred losses for farmers across most states other than Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat (graph below by India Data Insights).
How does Millets compare to Quinoa, you may ask? In 2013, the UN had declared the International Year of Quinoa. The reasons underlying this move were quite similar to that of millets. Soon, quinoa was known as a superfood and its production was commercialised. A trickle down effect was seen in the Andean community (primary producers of quinoa) in Peru as they saw a rise in incomes.
So, while millets can characteristically replace quinoa as superfoods, they might not have the same benefits to Indian farmers due to lack of government support and India’s track record of underpaying labour costs. In addition to this, owing to the power dynamics between farmers and market forces, there are nuanced negative effects of such a rise in prices in relation to food access and security. As Jacqueline Hughes mentions in an interview – “It is not the choice of the people who grow it, it is the choice of people who eat and trade in it.”
In the backdrop, millets have been a promising source of nutrition to a class of Indians that depend on a daily wage. Apart from the rice and wheat obtained from the public distribution system, millets are a popular option of cheap crop consumption. With rising prices, this crop too will be rendered inaccessible to daily wage workers, domestic workers and farmers themselves who will prefer to sell it at the increased prices rather than consume a portion of their yield.
Many have applauded the innovative promotion that the government has showered millets with but there is evidently a lack of real support to the farmers cultivating them. We need to ensure that not only do they receive fair wages for their crops but also consume them at subsidised rates. While there are some steps that the government has taken such as including millets as part of Midday Meal Scheme and setting a Minimum Selling Price for certain major millets, there are many loopholes in regulation and implementation. In many instances, there is a sheer lack of awareness among the farmers regarding the existing policies since much of this is lip service provided to the media.
India’s focus on mainstreaming millets along with the support received from multilateral organisations such as the UN can be a powerful tool in the near future. Experts are confident that with an efficient upscale in production, millets have the potential to turn more of India’s arid terrains into fertile land and lead our way into revenue generation through carbon markets. As India places its hopes on millets to rescue us from climate change and food insecurity, we must remember that this dignity belongs to the small and marginal farmers who thanklessly preserved this crop.