MILLET, AMARANTH AND T’EF

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Old Mountain Crops

The world's food supply is precariously based on seven major crops — wheat, rice, maize, potato, barley, cassava and sorghum. We now cultivate fewer species of plants than did the pioneering farmers of Neolithic times. Such specialization and uniformity of our crops is the price we pay for the astonishing increase in the productivity of food crops over the past 50 years.

But the miracles produced by the plant scientists and agricultural technologies are mostly confined to the foods of richer countries, particularly cereals. The staple crops of the rural poor, particularly those in highland communities in the Andes, the Himalaya and in Africa, remain largely unchanged and are ripe for research work. The catch is that the impetus for improving the under-utilized staple crops of the poor will not come from the established international food industry, for transnational companies are not concerned with the ' development and improvement of subsistence crops. The industry looks for crops that require less processing, for "crops without seeds and chickens without feathers". For development of subsistence crops, we must rely on independent initiatives from the international agricultural scientists.

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