Table 3 : Policy changes and possible outcomes Government action
Possible effect on environment/agriculture
Possible effect on health status
Possible effect on financial status
Compulsory maintenance of landraces by Government and seed producing companies.
Helps maintain diversity.
Creates possibility for selection for better nutrition and taste qualities.
Lowers burden on farmers for landrace maintenance.
Limiting acreage under orchard crops/ commercial crops as a percentage of land holding for farmers with larger holdings.
Promotes a healthy balance in the environment and ensures diversity.
Ensures nutrition.
Helps farmers with more income.
Involving private sector companies in promoting millets. Eg., Horlicks to produce millet based food products.
May promote monoculture. Preservation of landraces by the company.
Improved health of women/ children. With rural areas changing into urban food habits, this ensures millet consumption
Better market for product.
Include millets in MDM scheme and procure from local sources.
Maintains local production.
Helps to provide better nutrition to kids and helps retain their habit of consumption of millets.
Has a readymade market for the produce. Farmers need not have to struggle for selling his produce.
While tree crops ensure a good financial support system for the farmers, they may be more vulnerable to climatic extremities and pest attacks. Thus, proper management practices and planning needs to be undertaken, so that both trees as well as millet crops are grown. Otherwise, short term financial gains may be largely offset by the effects of climate change in future. Also, the failure of tree crops and loss of varieties of millets may only aggravate the problems of the farmers while dealing with negative impacts of climate change.
These policy options may help to maintain enough landraces for in situ evolution in view of imminent climate change. This may also mitigate the prevalent malnutrition to some extent by making nutritious sources like millets available to the poor in this region. It is time to start understanding that eradication of hunger may not be the final goal post in ensuring healthy communities. In this region, malnutrition needs to be given equal emphasis. In this view it is time the government initiate policy changes with regards to cultivation of millets.
Women play a major role in both the fight against climate change and in eradicating chronic hunger and malnutrition. The bondage between millets and women in these tribal tracts is indispensible in this regard and cannot be broken. The fine line between substituting wealth for health needs to be precisely defined so that this region that suffers from endemic malnutrition does not further slip into health related problems.
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Way forward Odisha has about 30 districts with mountainous and hilly terrain that is suitable for the cultivation of Ragi and other millets. These regions are also home to tribes, in need of nutrition. Thus, propagating and encouraging these crops would benefit the local communities immensely.
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Current policies and implementation are at best a lip service to the declining cultivation of millets. Without any proactive steps undertaken for increasing the area under these crops or any efforts to resuscitate the varieties going extinct, we would lose precious resources for fighting against climate change induced food shortage. Based on the current scenario, we propose a few policy changes that may help to continue the tradition of millet growing in this region (See Table 3). LEISA INDIA ď ľ MARCH 2017
Ranjit K Sahu is a freelance writer currently located in Virginia, USA E-mail: sahurk9@gmail.com Ravi Shankar Behera Independent Freelance Development Consultant based in New Delhi E-mail: rsbehera@rediffmail.com Srinibash Das District Coordinator, Agragamee, Rayagada – 765001 Odisha E-mail: dassrinivash@gmail.com