Did the International Year of Millets make a difference?
International Year of Millets (IYM), is over, can we ask how effective it was? The Indian government put in major effort, from the topmost level, into promoting millets as healthy, sustainable crops. There were policy initiatives, extensive publicity, and everyone from corporates to state governments to self-help groups enthusiastically promoting millets.
Measured purely by visibility and awareness, it was a huge success.
Millet marketing was everywhere, and one can only hope that similar initiatives will be used on other crops, like tubers and tree-based crops. India put millets on the global stage.
Hosting the G20 summit was also useful, with millets on all menus. Millet has probably never featured as much in global diplomacy since 1576, when Swiss rowers took a huge pot of millet porridge down the Rhine river from Zurich to Strasbourg.
This was meant as food aid and to demonstrate the efficiency of their river transport, since the porridge is said to have been warm when it arrived, after traveling over 240 km in under 24 hours.
It may be a while before we know if IYM made a lasting difference. Did the flood of people presenting millet recipes and extolling their virtues really connect with consumers? With all the focus on the wonders of millets, few were asking the obvious question — if they are indeed so amazing, why did we stop consuming them?
The reality is that, across the world, people stopped consuming millets and shifted to wheat, rice, and maize because millets are usually too small to be milled to remove their tough coating — their name comes from mille, or thousand, for the many small seeds in each head of grain.
This seed coating makes millets durable and healthy, since most of their nutrients are in
