Over the last century some 75% of crop varieties have been lost, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. They say that we now rely on just three crops; wheat rice and maize for 60% of our calories. And poorer countries are almost twice as dependant on these cereals as richer nations. But are we relying on too few crops?  Kolli Hills in Tamil Nadu where millet farming is being reintroduced.
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In Southern India scientists are on their way to the Kolli Hills. An ancient culture is changing and these scientists believe that some old traditions point the way ahead out of what they see as a future global food crisis. The Kolli Hills are mountains of the Eastern Ghat range in Tamil Nadu. Nearly 40,000 people eke out a living high above the plains. Until the 1960s when the road was built they were all but cut off from the land below. The scientists are going to see the farming families who have been tilling this land for centuries.
They are beginning to have some success in a project to reintroducing a once popular grain, millet. But it’s not easy. Millet has been neglected by science and is of little commercial value. Many farmers have switched to cash crops using the money to buy cheap rice. Although globally now a minor crop, millet is both highly nutritious and very tough. Millet could help provide secure food for the future around the world especially with accelerating climate change.
Sayed Azam-Ali, Professor of Tropical Agronomy, University of Nottingham: First of all I think the environments are going to be more unpredictable so we need crops that are going to be safe, therefore food security rather than food production and yield and I think we are going to have environments in which those crops that are grown locally, we’re going to provide more than just food for that local population. We’re going to have to feed a wider range of people, and we can’t rely on importing and moving crops around the world indefinitely. I think we have to be more reliant on locally sourced foods.
Millet was once the main source of nutrition for farmers and their families in Kolli Hills.
Dr S. Bala Ravi, MS Swaminathan Research Foundation: Their forefathers grew much of the area under these crops. This is the only food crop they can depend on. At that time there was on communication system, there was no public distribution system so this was the only dependable crop for them which could be grown in the hills.
But the experts worry that traditional knowledge of how to grow it is in danger of dying out.
 Harvesting the millet crop in the Kolli Hills.
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Dr Oliver King, Senior Scientist, MS Swaminathan Research Foundation: If we see the farmer who is more than 50 or 60 he is certainly still recalling in his memory about the traditional farming system. But when we interact with the younger girls or boys or younger youths they really don’t know about the farming system of millets. I would say it’s a kind of cultural erosion.
Just four km from the millet project, scientist Dr Balakrishnan from the Swaminathan Foundation is meeting farmers who grow only cassava, also known as tapioca. Like millet, it too was once neglected in different part of the world but now here in the hills It’s the cash crop they sell to the factories in the plains below.
Balakrishnan (conversation in Tamil): He finds it quite profitable, this crop is making a good living for him. Only 20 years back they used to grow millets he says, they’ve forgotten growing millets since 20 years. Nobody in this village, he says, is willing to go to other crops - everybody is continuing with tapioca growing.
Crops like millet were the victim of a hugely successful drive to end hunger in countries like India. Forty years ago the Green Revolution saw money and resources poured into a few crops like wheat and rice to increase output.
Professor M S Swaminathan was at the centre of that revolution. But even then he foresaw that there were dangers in relying on very few crops. He wants farmers to grow a wide range of crops.
Professor MS Swaminathan, Chairman, MS Swaminathan Research Foundation: So I cautioned our farmers. Single varieties, genetic homogeneity - these are the words I used - would increase vulnerability to pests and diseases. Therefore you must have varietal diversity, you must conserve agro-biodiversity. These are all in print 1968 January.
Despite these warnings, the last forty years has seen the major crops throughout the world mopping up almost all R&D spending.
Sayed Azam-Ali: If I’m a government and I say that I’m going to spend a million dollars of research on rice I know I’m going to get some return on it because it’s a major crop. So even if I improve the yield by 0.1 percent it’s going to have a global significance. If I take a marginal crop that somebody tells me is going to be important in the future but I’ve got no evidence for that and I spend a million pounds I don’t know if it’s going to produce – even if it produces ten times the yield, what’s the global significance for that? Unless we’ve got a market for it and a promotion for it, that one million pounds is going to be that much more difficult to defend.
The problem of forgotten crops is not confined to India. Italy – a country famed for its cooking –is losing agricultural heritage. Isabella dalla Ragione has spent the last quarter century looking for lost varieties of fruit in Umbria. For her it's a never-ending quest.
 Isabella dalla Ragione, with a medlar.
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Isabella dalla Ragione, Associazone Archeologia Arborea: We know that this was very important for the Romans, the Romans used a lot of this medlar.
The Romans used medlar to aid digestion. It is just one of the four hundred trees bearing forgotten fruits that Isabella has rescued and planted in her orchard.
Isabella: It's not only a nostalgic view because some of these varieties are very good, very good to sell, good smell and food flavour and so why to lose, why to throw away? So they are our past and they can also be our future.
But the question is how do crops like millets and medlars fight their way back like cassava and get the R&D to be improved, cultivated, sold and eaten once again?
PART TWO
In Kolli Hills many farmers had given up their traditional but reliable millet for the short-term benefits of the cash crop cassava. But cassava has its problems.
Bala Ravi: Cassava needs a certain amount of rainfall and distribution for developing tuber and tuber enrichment. So it will be unfavourable to cassava. It will be favourable to shift to millet, so the millets are suited to very adverse situations both in terms of soil fertility as well as the water availability.
And on the ground, progress has been made with thirty of the two hundred and fifty villages in the hills are growing millet again. Millet’s advantage over rice is a higher nutritional value. Oliver King has been there for ten years and has helped it happen.
Oliver King: All these millets are rich in vitamins and folic acid – folic acid is very essential for younger children under three years old.
But scientists are aware of a major drawback - it’s very labour intensive.
Oliver King: Now she’s pounding, she's going for pounding now. Traditionally she’s been doing this but she's an old lady, but the younger generation especially young girls, don't prefer, no longer do they want to do the same. There is a lot of work involved in these millets. It's very hard, for pounding this amount they take about half an hour. For completely pounding this.
Scientists realise that asking farmers to grow millet for their own good is not enough. They can sell it for cash too.
Bala Ravi: That’s the dilemma. We can’t just be evangelists and tell them. If tapioca gets more money, they are poor, they want to have money.
Oliver King: That is why the Swaminathan Foundation especially with reference to this particular issue are creating an economic stake in conservation and it's very important.
Bala Ravi: We want the farmer instead of selling the raw harvest at low rate, want to enhance its value by various processing methods by which we are supply the various machineries We are increasing the capacity for processing them, train them for this particular thing and then we have created a market link so that they can bring out their own entrepreneurship and enhance it.
Agricultural scientists in Bangalore are also busy developing millet varieties to make them more disease resistant and to give them greater yields.
Dr KT Krishne Gowda, Project Co-ordinator, University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore: We are developing the production technology, we are trying to fine tune it, keeping the objective of minimising the cost and enhancing the productivity. So the farmer is benefited by growing this crop.
Experts complain that millet lacks investment
Dr E. G. Ashok, Agronomist, University of Agricultural Science, Bangalore: Institutional support is required for production of new varieties and the development of production packages and also plant production package.
Krishne Gowda: What is happening you know is that the rice and the wheat they have been in the public distribution system, but the force in not there for these millet crops.
The force is in the public distribution system. It’s a network of government shops where people can buy subsidised rice but not millet.
Alok Sinha: More than 98% of the people of India – they eat rice indeed, and it has been so for centuries. So if the government wants to have a full security for its citizens then wheat and rice have to be given prime importance. So therefore wheat and rice is subsidised both for the farmer who grows it and for the consumer who eats it.
Prof. Swaminathan: We recommended that the food security basket, the public distribution system should be enlarged. Not only wheat and rice but all the millets. If it's Kolli Hills or the Namakal as we call it, The Public Distribution system should include all these grains.
Alok Sinha: Right now, for what are known as coarse grains like millet and maize, the open market price levels are far above the minimum support level. It is not true that we neglect millet and other coarse grains, it’s just that they don’t – as of now, because of market price conditions – need our support.
Back in Italy Isabella della Ragione has been searching for forgotten varieties of fruit. Today she’s found a rare bitter orange in a mountain village. She believes that the secret to preserving old varieties is to create markets. At present these bitter oranges are only grown in small quantities, and for her this is a problem.
Isabella dalla Ragione: The problems is that the small farmers they are old people and they have problems to sell products, they have problem to be in the market, the big market because of the course the big market wants a big quantity of products, they live only with the local market and small products.
Molecular analysis could help these varieties in the future. At nearby Perugia University, molecular biologists are helping to preserve and develop some of the fruit that Isabella finds.
Dr Emidio Albertini, Plant Biology, Agroenvironmental and Animal Biotechnology, University of Perugia: We did the molecular analysis with Isabella’s apples because she collected some material and then we wanted to check if those materials were the same varieties or were different varieties. And in doing that we also added some other apples just to look for markers that could discriminate her varieties from the commercial ones.
Genetic identification could allow old varieties to be cross-bred and improved by adding traits. This would make them easier to cultivate and sell commercially.
Isabella: Of course I know that is a dream for us to keep this kind of agriculture. But we need because in the other way we lose everything.. And I don’t know if that’s a price we want to pay.
Back in the Kolli Hills, Oliver King is talking to another tapioca farmer who is not sure he wants to pay the price.
Oliver King: He says the people are saying that all the nutritious crops like finger millets are important, very nutritious that’s why I’m thinking of cultivating some of these grains on my land. He is also looking for alternatives system, especially millets because day by day the nutrition in the soil is depleting now. Because they have been cultivating for about ten years. The productivity in tapioca is declining and that is an important message he is delivering to us.
Some farmers are on their way to creating a market for millet. New local machines are producing refined millet that can be sold and eaten.
Balakrishnan: They say that because grinding is easier now they can grow more millets and they use this machine for their, making malt and ragi powder and they can regularly take millets food in their homes… They are consuming themselves a small amount of the product. This material they are sending it to the supermarkets and they can make a profit.
 Kolli Hills millet sales increased 300% in 2007.
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Kolli Hills millet products are now selling in 34 stores in the region. By weight, sales have increased 300% to 2 tonnes in 2007. It seems people are beginning to hear about the benefits of millet.
Shopper (translation): She says that this is a product of the Kolli Hills farmers and she selects the product because it’s very organic for her children and she will continue to buy it.
Shopper 2: It is new to the market but is available in the olden days. It is good for the development of children, it is good for the growth of children, it is more energy content.
Mixing the minor crops into the major farming system could be the future for food locally and globally. The success or failure of this venture still hangs in the balance.
Sayed Azam-Ali: We are now awakening to the idea that food is actually very important and the way that we grow food and process food and consume food and the range of species that we eat is very important to us and I think that in the next generation that will become one of the major issues.
Prof Swaminathan: These grains are going to be important. The rich people are becoming more health conscious. There are more diabetics in India than in any other country. Therefore, your crops have a great future, don't abandon them.
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