PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Crop Biology and Sustainability
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1592723
This article is part of the Research TopicHarnessing the Potential of Underutilized Crops: A Path to Food Security and Climate ResilienceView all 5 articles
An evidenced-based, farmer-focused revival of traditional cereals
Provisionally accepted
- 1Columbia University, New York City, United States
- 2M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
- 3Network for Conserving Central India, Mocha, Madhya Pradesh, India
- 4Azim Premji University, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
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Revival of agrobiodiversity is a lynchpin for climate resilience, improved human nutrition, local economies, and cultural diversity. Following decades of decline in traditional cereals, the highest policy levels in India are promoting their revival. The revival is potentially as transformative for agriculture and diets as the Green Revolution that promoted high-yielding rice and wheat in the early 1960s and serves as a model for other places where traditional cereals are in decline. While the Green Revolution successfully increased cereal production and self-sufficiency, in hindsight critics have identified several environmental, social, and nutritional shortcomings. Efforts to revive millets can learn from these shortcomings with ground-level, systematic data collection using an adaptive management approach. Based on our observations from over 2,000 households surveys in the central Indian Highlands, wWe propose three principles to guide the collection of evidence for an ecologically-, nutritionally-, and socially-secure revival: 1) maintain diversity of millet species and varieties to preserve genetic resources in a rapidly changing climate; 2) ensure equitable access to technology, inputs, information and markets for all farmers; and 3) enable farmers to balance the trade-off between income from selling and nutritional benefits from consuming millets. The case study, which indicates the need for technologies to reduce drudgery from processing and attention to the income-nutrition trade-off for the poorest segments of the population,A case study from the central Indian Highlands illustrates that ground-level data is needed to link high-level policy goals with field realities.
Keywords: Millets, India, Orphan crops, Neglected crops, Revival
Received: 13 Mar 2025; Accepted: 04 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 DeFries, King, Monga, Nagendra and Neelakantan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ruth DeFries, Columbia University, New York City, United States
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