Significant progress has been made in mainstreaming of millets in India through numerous initiatives, practices, policies and programmes at the state and national levels in India. As a strategy, mainstreaming has primarily focused on millets value chain development benefiting producers and consumers at either end of the millets supply chain. Millets, unlike other staple food crops, however, are historically deeply rooted in agricultural biodiversity and integral to cultural food use patterns, socio-cultural meanings, practices, and nutritional outcomes in the context of local and indigenous food systems. Their move from the ‘margins’ to the ‘mainstream’ and from the local to transnational supply chains, therefore requires a closer analysis.
By adopting a social-ecological perspective, my paper aims at foregrounding the multiple dimensions of millets (beyond their economic value), with a focus on agro-biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services at the landscape level, ecological processes, and tipping points, local/indigenous foodways, and farmers as stewards of biodiverse production ecosystems. I argue that the resilience of millets to increasingly uncertain and unexpected climate change impacts, will depend on sustaining agricultural biodiversity and biocultural heritage.
My paper examines the extent to which the mainstreaming approach engages with millets-as-commodity and millets-as-commons framing. This is important as each of these framings upholds a different approach to how food is produced, consumed, and distributed; hence holds significant implications for governance structures and institutions in relation to how we address concerns over biodiversity loss, climate change, loss of traditional/indigenous knowledge and skills, and erosion of cultural identities.
