Figure: Director General of ICRISAT Dr Jacqueline Hughes.

ICRISAT News

The International Year of Millets will provide a great opportunity to promote available technologies on millets and the benefits that come with millets to encourage consumption and utilisation of millets.

ICRISAT is taking the opportunity created by the UN declaration by joining partners such as FAO, AGRA, and FARA to demonstrate and showcase its work on millets as a world leader in providing solutions for dryland areas.

ICRISAT is a pioneering, international non-profit research for development organisation, specialising in improving dryland farming and agri-food systems. ICRISAT works with global partners to develop innovative science-backed solutions to overcoming hunger, malnutrition, poverty, and environmental degradation on behalf of the 2.1 billion people who reside in the drylands of Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and beyond.

In Eastern Africa, ICRISAT conducts agricultural research focusing on the following thematic areas:

• Crop improvement aiming at enhancing diversity, productivity, production, nutrition quality and profitability of grain legumes and cereals (sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, pigeonpea, chickpea and groundnut)

• Systems transformation aimed at providing empirical evidence and information for developing sustainable markets, policies, and regulations to create enabling conditions for transforming dryland agriculture from a subsistence-oriented livelihood to a market-oriented livelihood.

• Resilient farm and food systems working on rainfed crop and crop-livestock systems by developing innovative and collective approaches to managing landscapes for restoration, aggregating primary products for more effective marketing, employing digital means to exchange information and creating opportunities for agri-entrepreneurs.

Digital agriculture, empowering women and youth and promoting entrepreneurship are cross-cutting across all of ICRISAT's work. ICRISAT is a recipient of the Africa Food Prize 2021. In 2022, the Transforming Irrigation systems in Southern Africa (TISA) project, led by ICRISAT and partners, won the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) Excellence in Practice Gold Award.

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), a provider of agricultural solutions for dryland areas, hails the renewed focus on millets. The International Year of Millets aims at recognising these benefits of millets and promote awareness to encourage the consumption and utilisation of millets. Millets are staple crops of the drylands, where rainfall is low and soil fertility is poor. Moreover, millets have higher nutrient content compared to other major cereal crops.

https://pressroom.icrisat.org/millet-drylands-staple-at-the-centre-of-food-security