Category: In situ

More from India’s Kolli Hills and the efforts to reinvigorate millet cultivation there. A recent paper by anthropologist Elizabeth Finnis of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada is described in PLEC Digest. The paper is intriguingly titled “Now it is an easy life” ((E. Finnis 2009. “Now it is an easy life”: women’s accounts of cassava, millet and labor in South India. Culture and Agriculture 31(2): 88-94.)) and the editors at PLEC take this one step further by calling their post “So I can watch TV.”

The point is that there is a very good reason why millets are much less grown than formerly, despite cultural attachment, better nutritional composition and a much-preferred taste. They are a bother to prepare.

Rice has replaced millet as the main staple, freeing the women of a major and onerous morning job. Other income from cassava, and from work outside the local community, is used to vary the diet, pay for children’s education, and buy other commodities. These include bicycles and, for a minority as yet, prestigious goods such as TV sets and motor cycles. There is more time for social activity, and, as one young woman put it, there are more “times when we are free. So I can watch TV” (p.91).

So what to do? Apart from collecting the millets and storing them away in a genebank, that is. The author of the PLEC piece — though not Finnis — does refer to the well-known work of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation:

The project has given considerable attention to marketing issues, and began to provide involved communities with mechanical mills suitable for the dehusking of millet (which has thicker husks than rice) (Gruere et al 2009). However, up to the time of Finnis’ report, these had not reached the part of the Kolli hills in which she worked. In her paper, Finnis does not specifically discuss the Swaminathan project, but suggests that any project involving millet cultivation revival, especially for household use, needs to consider demands on women’s labour, and women’s labour preferences.

Here’s the bottom line:

While irrigation and market improvements could help, it would be reduction of processing time from hours to minutes made possible by mechanical hullers that might achieve most, “allowing women to take advantage of both their preferences for reduced labour loads and for the taste of millets in their everyday diets” (p. 92).

Well that doesn’t sound too difficult to me.