By Our Reporter
Shillong: A team of millet farmers from Meghalaya visited Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu recently to forge a network of millet growers and facilitate knowledge exchange in millet cultivation, conservation, consumption and commercialisation and also to study honey bee rearing and management.
Accompanying the team was Phrang Roy, Co-ordinator, Agro-biodiversity international and Chairman, North East Slow Food & Agro-biodiversity Society (NESFAS), Dr CO Rangad, Director NESFAS, and Wancy Passah of the Megahalaya Rural Development Society (MRDS).
To counter the stresses caused by climate change in the cultivation of food grains, millets have been identified as the food grain of the future because of their resilience to water, nutrient and climatic stresses.
Traditionally Meghalaya had been a millet growing and consuming State but the growing pressures of modernism have pushed this traditionally grown crop almost to extinction.
Knowledgeable farmers have in recent times articulated that they want to revive millet cultivation not only to ensure the maintenance of tradition but also to encourage biodiversity, food sovereignty and security.
To this end the team visited the project areas of the Agro-biodiversity Heritage Site of the Deccan Development Society (DDS) at Zaheerabad, Andhra Pradesh and interacted with the farmers and the Director, Dr PV Satheesh, who is also the National Convenor of the Millet Network of India (MINI) and his team.
Farmers from Meghalaya were impressed by the cultivation techniques especially the system of mixed farming practiced by the Andhra farmers, which was very akin to the system adopted under jhum farming.
The team visited fields where farmers subsisted on land barely two acres big but where mixed farming brought in enough food for a family of six members.
What especially impressed the team was that annually a Biodiversity festival is conducted in addition to numerous food festivals throughout the year. The farmers maintain family seed banks. A central community seed bank has also been established. There is also a millet market as well as a millet café. The team also visited the millet processing units which evoked keen interest.
The team then visited the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) at Chennai and the project areas of the foundation at Pondicherry and the Kolli hills.
The highlight of the visit was the meeting with Dr MS Swaminathan, the Father of the Green Revolution.
Dr Swaminathan said that Millets were a ‘Nutri Cereal’ and they are now being called the ‘Climate smart Cereals’.
Millets, he emphasized, will be the food grain of the future and we would do well to lay adequate emphasis on their cultivation, preserve their seed and most importantly ensure that biodiversity is maintained.
Dr Swaminathan also informed that the Government of India has taken a very positive step by including Millets in the PDS and the mid day meal scheme of the ICDS.
Dr Swaminathan, an internationally decorated and highly respected agricultural scientist lauded Phrang Roy for the leadership role he has been playing in promoting locally appropriate and sustainable smart but marginalised crops like millet.
The visit to the Bio-Village Resource Centre was also very informative and brought keen interest in community mobilization, organic farming, Rice Bio Parks, organic manures and the Village knowledge Centers (VKCs).The Meghalaya farmers were then taken to the Kolli hills where tribal farmers who are the traditional knowledge holders, are living sustainably in sync with nature and Biodiversity.
The MSSRF, in collaboration with Biodiversity International, is striving to promote pro- poor, pro- women, pro- nature and pro- livelihood activities thereby creating space for farmers to take their own decisions.
The Participatory Resource Mapping and the Community driven participatory plant breeding programmes were of immense interest to the visiting team.
The Meghalaya farmers also visited several villages in the Nilgiri Hills District of Tamil Nadu. They witnessed how small tribal communities defended their traditional seed and cultivation practices of mixed cultivation for their own food security against the onslaught of large scale commercial cultivation of tapioca, tea and maize.
The team also learnt how the staff of Keystone Foundation are enabling tribal communities to process millet into several products for marketing.
The team of farmers have returned with the determination to start community seed banks and pilot small processing units to dehull and pulverize millet.
Such a pilot unit would reduce the drudgery of women and help develop different food products from millet for sale initially within the neighbouring villages.
The trip was funded by MRDS, NESFAS and The Indigenous Partnership, Rome.