Indian tribe revives heirloom seeds for health and climate security

Food security and sustainability lessons

The revival of indigenous food systems also secures the nutritional well-being of the Dongria Kondh. Even though the farmers swear by the benefits of traditional crops, certain communities in the foothills and lower ranges of Niyamgiri have taken to government-subsidized rice for portions of their meals. However, the remote hamlets nestled deeper into the mountains still maintain more millets in their diets.

“Ragi [finger millet] gives us strength, rice just fills our stomachs,” said 18-year-old Laxmi Kadraka from Rodango village.

Lakshminarayan Pushty, a public health officer in the district of Rayagada, advocates old agricultural ways and eating habits for the remote tribe. “When they eat a mix of a variety of millets, vegetables and lentils, they get more fiber, protein, antioxidants and minerals such as magnesium and potassium, in comparison to only rice,” he said. “Just like their farms, good nutrition is all about how diverse their plate is.”

The Dongrias hope that renewing the culture of multiple crops will generate enough produce for every household. That would go a long way in alleviating health issues like malnutrition, anemia and maternal mortality that are prevalent among the tribe. Research shows that 60 percent of school-age children are malnourished, while 55 percent of adults show chronic energy deficiencies.

“Ten to 15 years back, our people used to eat food from the mountains — our millet, ragi,” said 31-year-old Dinja Jakesika, the sarpanchor head of the Kurli Gram Panchayat. (Gram Panchayats are self-governance blocks formed by a cluster of villages.) “Ever since they started eating rice made available by the government’s Public Distribution System, they have become very weak. Our men grow old faster.”

Over the past 50 years, the area under millet cultivation across India shrank from nearly 370,000 square kilometers (143,000 square miles) to less than 150,000 square kilometers (58,000 square miles), a decline of 60 percent that the government attributes to changes in consumption patterns and conversion to rice and wheat cultivation, among other factors.

In Niyamgiri, the variety of nutritious heirloom seeds withered apace, not only with the introduction of rice but also when the government started a scheme to promote cash crops like pineapple, turmeric and ginger amongst the tribe in 1988, according to Susanta Kumar Dalai, a social worker in the Dongria Kondh communities. “If you talk to the different farmers, you will realize that a minimum of 50 percent of millet land is being used for cash-crop cultivation,” he said. “This is very dangerous as the Dongrias principally depend on their traditional crops for food security.”

Village head Jakesika wants to change the worrying land-use pattern in her sacred mountains. “I want to bring more land from the hills under traditional crops,” she said.

Waking up to the nutritional benefits and climate resiliency of the long-neglected millets, as well as to the needs of the indigenous small-scale farmers who cultivate these hardy crops,the Indian government has started promoting them under the National Food Security Act. Beneficiaries of the Public Distribution System, roughly 813 million citizens, would be able to get millets to eat at deeply subsidized prices of 1to 3 rupees (1 to 4 U.S. cents) per kilogram.

The Orissa state government has also taken up an ambitious five-year “millet mission” since 2016. The program aims to increase millet consumption in 60,000 households across several districts by boosting production and setting up processing machinery. By producing millets to meet a larger demand, the project also aims at improving the economic security of the Dongria Kondhs.

Village head Jakesika is keen to adopt the government’s initiative to boost cultivation of traditional millets, but is wary of disrupting old, indigenous practices. She emphasized that the soil’s health is paramount to the Dongria Kondhs.

“We cannot keep producing more and more at the cost of our soil, even if it is for a few varieties of millets,” she said. “The soil is us. We live in these hills as one entity, and that is most important.”

For her, sustainability solutions are not “one size fits all.”

“We will take all the help that we get, but only if it keeps our customs alive,” she said. “We will not blindly follow ways of modern agriculture for some misplaced notion of wealth and well-being.”

Banner image: Dongria women from Hutesi village farm the slopes of the Niyamgiri hill range. Image by Indrajeet Rajkhowa.

Sonali Prasad reports from climate frontlines across the world and is a former Pulitzer Traveling Fellow and an Earth Journalism Grantee. She can be found on Instagram and Twitter @sonaliprasad07.

Indrajeet Rajkhowa is a freelance photographer based in India, who specializes in environmental portraiture. He can be found on Instagram @indrarajkhowa.

Editor’s note: Reporting for this story was supported by the Internews Earth Journalism Network.

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