Over 500 representatives from civil society organisations, state governments, policy makers, scientists, corporates, and farmers will brainstorm, over two-days making millets mainstream and making it the people’s food.
The two-day event, starting Friday, will focus on finding ways to make millet affordable and accessible while benefiting millions of farmers and rural entrepreneurs through people-centric approaches to millet cultivation and processing establish productive and resilient rainfed agriculture) in collaboration with the Centre’s National Rainfed Area Authority.
The convention will focus on three areas: how to include millets in public diets such as PDS and ICDS schemes to combat malnutrition; how to support local millet processing and markets; and, finally, how to ensure a sustainable increase in millet production and productivity while preserving millet biodiversity.
“To achieve scale, millets need to be introduced into the PDS and state nutrition programmes. Decentralised procurement, as noted by the Shanta Committee (2014) would result in: greater equity in distributing the benefits of MSP to farmers; reduction in costs of transport and storage; reduction in risk of spoilage during storage; and reduction in corruption and leakages. Decentralised procurement also benefits farmers and entrepreneurs with limited capital to engage in processing, trading and value addition,” a statement said.
Members of the private sector, such as SELCO, Borne Technology, and Farm Easy, will participate in the roundtable discussions on millets processing, according to the statement. All of them have demonstrated experience in innovating appropriate millet processing machinery.