The superfoods that can help humankind eliminate hunger

At critical junctures in life, it is often said that it is best to look back before moving ahead. Today, the world faces an unprecedented food crisis, mainly due to climate change but also due to civil strife and of course, since last year, the Russia-Ukraine war, which has hurt farmers in two of the largest grain and fertilizer-producing and exporting countries.
The increasingly frequent vagaries of weather, like prolonged droughts or floods, have also played havoc with farmers and their harvests, leading not only to huge economic costs for farmers, but also impacting consumers through inflation. In the past few years, food inflation has soared to record levels, leading to a sharp rise in malnutrition and hunger around the world.
With no easy solutions to global warming and its ever-increasing impact on agricultural output, it is perhaps time to review what we grow and how. And that is where humanity can look to the past and find solutions that have existed almost ever since humans began farming. For several millennia, the key crops were coarse grains, notably millet, which is a large family of crops that continue to be grown in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and South America.
However, since the advent of the 20th century and especially after the Second World War, the world has seen a dramatic shift toward grains like wheat and rice, which produce higher crop yields but consume lots of water and soil nutrients. With the world’s population rising sharply and large companies taking hold of the entire value chain from the farm to the fork, there was an incentive to raise the yields of these two refined grains. This led to the near-decimation of coarse grain crops in most countries. And even in the areas where these coarse grains were and continue to be grown, they are mainly used as animal fodder due to their low market price.
Now is the time to review the entire food system and the real place of refined and coarse grains. Refined grains, such as wheat and especially rice, are extremely harmful for the environment, notably from the perspective of the inputs that they need for a proper harvest. Take rice, for instance. The staple food of almost half the world’s population consumes voracious amounts of water. Growing just one kilogram of rice takes up to 5,000 liters of water, while wheat needs up to 1,500 liters per kilogram. The same weight of many of the coarse grains can be grown using between 350 and 700 liters of water.
Moreover, rice and wheat are delicate crops that need a lot of soil nutrients, supplemented with liberal doses of fertilizers and pesticides. The production of these essential items takes its own share of water and causes other forms of pollution. In comparison, millets are hardy as they are the staple crops of the semi-arid tropics, where grains like wheat or rice cannot be cultivated due to low rainfall and poor soil fertility.

Now is the time to review the entire food system and the real place of refined and coarse grains.

Ranvir S. Nayar

Millets also have a higher nutritional content compared to major cereal crops and ensure food and nutrition security. Moreover, millets are highly tolerant to drought and other extreme weather conditions, meaning they are endemic to such geographies.
Thus, the question of which are the crops of the future is essentially a no-brainer. But getting millets to take their due place on the table is an uphill task for many reasons. Firstly, farmers need to be convinced of the viability of millets as a crop, not just for consumers but also for their own subsistence. Historically, wheat and rice have attracted a far higher price than most of the common millets.
For farmers to get a better price for millets, they need to be completely integrated in the distribution chain, which itself needs to be broadened to include large tracts of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. An uptick in pricing will only be seen once harvests of coarse grains are picked up from farms by food distribution companies and taken to wholesalers and retailers, as is done with wheat and rice. And the food retailers also need to position and promote coarse grains.
But perhaps the biggest change in the fortunes of growers of coarse grains can only come once consumers start asking for these grains at shops. This requires an integrated and deep-rooted change in consumer behavior, as well as in the attitude of farmers and traders. However, for this kind of radical change to come about, governments need to step in. They ought to mount aggressive awareness campaigns showcasing the advantages of coarse grains and positioning them as the superfoods they actually are.
A large-scale and credible promotion, along with incentives for farmers and other food industry stakeholders, is needed for such a change to come about. It is only by focusing on coarse grains that the world can expect to eliminate hunger, starvation and malnutrition.
As 2023 is the UN-mandated International Year of Millets, this may be the springboard needed for the world to open its eyes and seize the solution that has been available to humankind for centuries.

• Ranvir S. Nayar is managing editor of Media India Group.