Dr. Sanjeeb K. Behera, Head of the IEC Division, AARDO started the inaugural session followed by Dr. Manoj Nardeosingh, Secretary General, AARDO, and Dr. Trilochan Mohapatra, Former Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, GOI, who was the Guest of Honor of the session. The session was moderated by Professor M Moni, Ex-Director General of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and Professor Emeritus at Shobhit Institute of Engineering and Technology.
Dr. Nardeosingh, while speaking about the collaboration of the rural-centric organization between Asia and Africa said that AARDO is also a platform for pooling, sharing, and transferring techniques to improve the quality of life of rural areas. At present, there are 2.6 billion people in rural Asia and Africa. The catastrophic level of food insecurity is a never been seen before record high which has only been worsening over the COVID years. Healthy food is out of reach for over 375.8 million people in the Asia Pacific region.
He stressed the importance of repeatedly upgrading the food system. Rural areas need to be fully integrated into the food value chains for resilient food security and to reduce poverty.
He stated that food security is a basic human right, not a commodity for sale. He also spoke about the importance of the International Year of Millets and the need to spread awareness of the same. This involves hosting training programs, round table meetings, and special publications on millets.
Speaking about the GOI’s initiatives on millets, Dr. Mohapatra said that the Government of India has taken several initiatives to make millets a mainstream food. Consumption needs to be increased to the level of rice and wheat crops.
He added that large-scale awareness is needed to enhance and encourage the consumption of millet. Promotion by creating new recipes- distributing them for free would help promote millets to a great extent.
The first technical session was on ‘Introduction to Millets and Its Cultivation: Trends and Possibilities in AARDO Member Countries’ led by Dr. Anil Pratap Singh, Former Addl. Commissioner (Crops), Ministry of Agriculture, GOI, while the second technical session for the day was on the ‘Case Studies by Dhan Foundation’ where M Karthikeyan, Program Advisor in DHAN foundation, Hyderabad, India led the discussion.
The highly informative sessions provided insights into the following topics:
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Millets value additions: challenges and perspectives;
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Revalorizing small millets in rainfed regions of the South Asia global millets market and strengthening millets value chain in Africa and Asia: Challenges and Perspective.
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Innovative/affordable technologies for enhancing production and value addition of millets;
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Challenges in millet cultivation: farmers' perspectives in Africa with a thrust on Kenya;
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Strategies to involve rural youth and promote startups in millets cultivation, value addition, and value chain;
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Linking millet to global food security.
For the second day of the training session, the organization has planned 2 technical sessions led by Dr. V Ravi Kumar, Technical officer, ICAR- Indian Institute of Millets Research, Hyderabad, India, and Sathyanarayanan Raman, Chief Operating Officer, Millet Mart VenturesPrivate Limited, International Marketing and Consulting Office, India, respectively.
