 Welcome all to this webinar on the nutritional benefits of millets. We're very excited to be organizing this webinar to commemorate the International Year of Millets in 2023. It's my pleasure to give the floor to our moderator for today. Dr. Chuba Menla Jamir is co-lead for Mountain Agriculture for the thematic working group on Mountain Agriculture at the Himalayan University's consortium. And she'll be our moderator today and she'll introduce our first speaker over to you Chuba. Thank you very much, Lauren. And hello to everybody. I think I must greet everybody in a different time zone. So good morning, good afternoon and good evening to all the participants. Thank you very much for finding time to join us in this webinar. This is the third webinar series that we are having. And today we are very privileged to have with us very renowned and well experienced speakers for this webinar. Just before we start with this webinar, I would like to say a little bit about this webinar and why we are organizing this. The United Nations declared this year that is 2023 as the International Year of Millets and governments from local to global institutes, civil societies, businesses and individuals have joined this very pertinent and exciting initiative at various levels and capacities. The question is, why millets? And it's already now, we've already started half the second half of the year. And we, most of us must have heard a lot of things about millets, so I'm not going to go speak about millets, but just very quickly. Millets are nothing new to us. Across the world, millets were grown in the past by various human societies and as a stable food. Under the current scenario, that is current scenario where we have resource scarcity, and we are also having issues related to climate change. This food is considered a smart food, because millets can grow under various environmental conditions, even in the added conditions, as well as with minimal inputs. So they are very smart, important crops, even not only in the past, but in the current scenario. It's not just that, from nutrition point of view also, millets are highly nutritious, they are rich in protein, fiber and various minerals and vitamins. So to celebrate the International Year of Millet 2023, the STSN is hosting a webinar series, and this is the third, the last of the three webinar that we are organizing. And today we are going to introduce to you about the nutritious benefits of millets and also how to prepare these millets. So without wasting time, let me introduce to you our first speaker. Our first speaker is Professor Jessica Fanzo. She is a professor of climate at the Columbia Climate School. Among a number of positions and ecologists, Jessica has served on high level task forces for US aid, the G20, the EAT Lancet Commission, and the Rockefeller Foundation. And she was also the team leader for the high level panel of experts report on food systems and nutrition for the United Nations Committee on Food Security. So we have today with us, somebody who has a huge experience and highly knowledgeable in the area of food security. So thank you very much, Professor Fanzo for joining us, and over to you. Great, thank you so much Chuba, and thanks to STSN for hosting this really important event on millets. I'm going to present a bit of a picture of nutrition and some of the benefits of millets, and I hope we can engage in a conversation. We hope our second speaker can also join us, but I think there's connectivity problems for her. And I just want to thank everyone who has joined us online. I think a lot of you, it's evening, you probably want to be having dinner hopefully with millets in that dinner but I really appreciate everyone joining. I'm going to share my screen. Lauren and Chuba had mentioned this is the international year of millets. And it's really important because every year proposals are sent to the FAO to be the international year of something. And it's competitive to be selected, whatever theme it is, whether it's family farming, it's a crop, it can be a number of different themes across the wide spans of food systems. So it's really quite wonderful that millets were selected as what would be considered traditionally a neglected or underutilized crop or what we're calling now opportunity crop so having millets and as they as part of the FAO's international year is really important to help advocate and spread the importance of millets as an important crop as part of our diets. And I know many of you probably online have worked in millets have advocated for this year so it's a really fantastic thing to be recognized. And so there's a lot of reasons why FAO gave millets a whole year of celebration. Millets are diverse, there's many different types. Many of them are growing in drylands but across different varying agro ecosystems. They're often considered climate resilient, tolerant to nutrient poured graded soils. They can thrive and drought and harsh growing conditions. They're quite adaptable. They don't need a significant amount of inputs. They're integral to ancestral to traditions, cultures and indigenous knowledge. They're important for nutrition. I'll talk about that. There's been a lot of work looking at their contribution to human and animal health. They have a low glycemic index. They're diverse and their taste and in their use and the types of recipes they can be used in. And of course they're an important source of income for many people around the world, particularly for women who are working and have been working with millets for decades and decades. And they contribute to what we would consider a thriving sustainable agro food system. And there's many different types of millets used and grown around the world. I think we can consider sorghum, a major millet, but foxtail, pearl, barnyard, a guinea millet, very important in West Africa, finger millet, teff grown in Ethiopia, such a variety of millets and their texture, the way their agronomic practices, and of course their taste and how they can be used in our everyday diets. Here's just an example from a paper published by Yousaf et al. in 2021, looking at the nutritional and functional diversity of millets, but particularly processing and how that changes and alters nutrition. And there's just a few pictures of the millet plants and their kernels and how they look. You can already see the vast diversity where they're grown from China to West Africa, of course, India, Japan. And you can just see the diversity in the shape, the color and the size and where they're grown. I'm just showing you a map, same paper of the yields of millets produced around the world with India producing a lot of millets, followed by Niger produces a lot and harvest a lot. We have Senegal, Chad, Nigeria, Mali, Ethiopia, Sudan, Burkina Faso. So as many countries growing these millets around the world, but these are the major producers. When we compare millets to other staple crops, I think this is a nice example showing you rice versus sorghum versus maize versus some of these smaller millets, kodo little barnyard and foxtail millet. This is a paper published by Ruth DeFries, a colleague of mine at Columbia University, who spends most of her field work in India and has increasingly focused on millets. And you can see that the nutrient content for many of the monsoon cereals show substantial difference for protein and iron content, but quite a similar energy content across these different staple crops comparing to millets. Rice has the lowest content for both protein and iron, you can see here on this far left, with sorghum having the highest protein content. Rice is of course very on the iron content. With two of the four types of small millets barnyard and little millet have the highest in iron, whereas compared to comparing to maize which has very little iron. So of course, the nutrient content varies depending on which variety of millet you're looking at, how it's grown, and of course, future impacts of climate with more CO2 in the atmosphere, there could be implications on the nutrient composition of these crops, including the millets. Here's another table showing you some of the nutrient composition, comparing different millets and this is showing you calcium, iron, phosphorus, zinc, some of the water soluble, thiamine, niacin and riboflavin. I always tend to as a nutritionist look at the iron and zinc content because these two nutrients are very hard to reach a sufficient intake for because a lot of these nutrients, these micronutrients are often found in animal source foods and more nutrient dense diets, but for many people in the world they can't afford animal source foods, so these staple grains and particularly millets for some populations become incredibly important. But if you just look at the iron content you see the varying nutrient composition depending on which variety you're looking at. And this is one paper done by Tripathi at all in a book on millet and millet technologies. And here's the zinc content, not captured across all of them, but you can see the varying degrees. So we look at foxtail and barnyard millets versus sorghum, for example. So these two key nutrients, iron and zinc, really interesting to see the composition across the different millet varieties and how much they vary. This was a paper that we published several years ago when we were looking at in India, 34 districts, which shows you here on the left this map of dotted gray lines that outline India's 20 agro ecological regions and we focused in these 34 districts. And what we did was we looked at the nutrient content, comparing sorghum, rice, small millet and maize, as you can see in these, this bar graph on the top, sorghum and blue, rice and orange, small millet and gray, and maize and yellow. And we looked at, we combined the yields with nutrient content, energy nutritional yields averaged across these 34 districts from 2000 to 2012. And what we see is that the iron nutritional yields are lowest for rice and highest for sorghum. And small millets have higher nutritional yield for iron and rice, despite the relatively low yield for small millets. And protein nutritional yields are highest for maize and lowest for small millet. So it's really interesting when you start to look across these different varieties of and different comparing to different staple crops in a specific region. You can start to see the differences in the nutritional yield. And we also looked at the land required to supply one adults 100% of dietary reference intake for the three nutrients protein, iron and energy shown in the bottom graph. And what really forces the idea that sorghum is the most land efficient cereal to produce iron and maize for protein and energy. So of the four cereals rice is the only cereal that is less land efficient for producing protein and iron than for energy, which is protein. And of course, rice is a major staple in places like India, but it really shows the benefits of of, and the differences between the nutrient composition of these crops and the land required. So we looked across nutritional yields climate resilience and price of foods and we see that rice the dominant crop in the region is the least land efficient for providing iron, and most sensitive to rainfall variability sorghum and maize provide high nutritional yields, while small millet is most resilient to climate variability. Price incentives are strong for rice, but what it shows is that no single crop is superior for all the objectives in this region of India. Maybe when a crop is more climate resilient, it gets a lower price at the market, or if a crop is nutrient rich, it may not be as climate resilient. So looking at the multiple outcomes that we care about, are crops important for nutrition? Are they important in resilience towards climate adaptation? Are they beneficial for livelihoods of farmers? It's important to look at these different objectives at the same time and see where there are synergies and tradeoffs. So another area of work happening that you'll see a lot in the literature are the contribution of millets to human health. And there's been many studies, but much more research needs to be done to understand the direct attribution and the mechanisms of how millets contribute to better human health. So when you look across the literature, millets have properties of being antioxidants, being anti-hypertensive, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, antimicrobial, important in reducing cholesterol, important in keeping the glycemic index low, anti-carcinogenic potential, promotion of a healthy gut microbiota. So there's been a lot of claims about the importance of millets for human health, but of course a lot more research needs to be done in this area and is ripe for more funding towards that research. I'll just end with a couple of things to consider. You know, as a researcher, I always say that we need more research, but we really are needing more research on milling technology. How do we ensure that it's easy to process these millets? And there's a lot of work being done on that. We also need low resource, low cost kind of technologies that make it easy for farmers to want to grow these foods and process them and get them to markets. We also need to be thinking about the whole seed system, the quality of these seeds. I'm not an expert on seed biology, but there seems to be an emerging literature around seed savings. I'm not sure that heirloom varieties are saved, but that savings also involves ensuring that the seeds are of high quality and don't degrade. One issue with millets like a lot of other staple grains, they can contain anti-nutrients, tannins, protease inhibitors, oxalates, phytates that can bind up key micronutrients like iron and zinc that I mentioned earlier. Reducing absorption. So of course, processing again becomes very important to minimize those anti-nutrients and lower, particularly things like phytates. Millets can also contain high levels of aflatoxin, particularly the B1 form, which has carcinogenic properties and immune system suppression. So again, processing post-harvest storage becomes very important for millets. There's also something called codo-poisoning, which I just learned about, but it's a fungal contamination producing cyclo-piazonic acid, which is a toxic fungal secondary metabolite, which can acutely affect someone consuming millets, particularly codo-millet, causing loss of speech, loss of muscular control, quite scary. So again, dealing with this fungal contamination will be critically important with post-harvest storage and processing. And then overall, there's a shortage of research devoted to increasing yields or quality of course cereals and particularly millets. So there's a lot of work to be done to mainstream millets, but the benefits and the potential nutrition implications are quite significant for human health. Thank you so much and looking forward to the discussion. Thank you very much, Professor Fanzo. That was a very insightful presentation. And may I now give time for a couple of questions from the participants? You can post your questions on the chat. So a question, Chuba, in the Q&A as well. Yes, there is one. There's a question by Karima Singh. Thanks for the insights. My question is, in the context of the growing emphasis on plant-based protein, particularly in vulnerable communities where nutritional security is a pressing concern, how do you perceive the role of millets as a transformative factor? Also, how can this help in bringing a new era of plant-based protein? So that's over to you. Great question, Karima. I think millets are an important part of the story of plant-based or let's say plant-dominant diets. I think a lot of you know that the way agriculture research and development has been structured over the last few decades has relied on a handful of crops, maize, rice, wheat. And if we think about moving towards a more plant-dominant diet, so consuming less animal source foods that are intensive on land and our contributors to greenhouse gases, we need to expand the diversity of the kinds of plant foods that we consume. Of course, there's fruits and vegetables, there's legumes, there's nuts and seeds. But we need to expand those staple crops, which are very important parts, and sometimes the main part of everyone's diets, to expand towards more variety. And so millets play a really important role in moving away from these traditional crops that were funded for many years and were important to a degree. We can think about the Green Revolution, for example, but had incredible negative unintended consequences and trade-offs. And many of these more traditional crops were marginalized along with the people that grew those crops. And some could argue that maize, rice, and wheat were colonial crops, they were not what traditionally was grown and consumed. We need to get back to ensuring that those crops are not lost forever, you know, crops are like language. If you don't use it, you lose it. So millets can become really important in diversifying that staple grain, a basket, and they're resilient. There's going to be places that are going to get very dry, millets can thrive in those dry environments. So to me, it's a really important solution to diversifying that plant-based diet, basket, and giving people options beyond just wanting to, I mean, rice is delicious. I know many people eat rice, I eat it too. Why not explore some of these other grains that are incredibly nutrient-rich and tasty as well? And I have a feeling all these people online know more about millets than I do. So it'd be great to hear comments from others and experiences with their millets. I'm going to take two questions together because they're related. One question is by Kishore and the other one is by Rashmi. So the question is, what are the health hazards created by excessive consumption of millets? And second question is, please explain millets and microbiota in connection to celiac disease. Yeah. I don't know so much of the health hazards, Kishore, and maybe others do online beyond what I had mentioned around whether or not the millet is contaminated with aflatoxin or some sort of a fungus that can contribute to ill health. I don't, I mean, excess in any food can, there's calories associated with that and there's, you know, we need more diversity. So excess of millets, I think really the most major concern are these issues of contaminated millets that are not stored properly or processed that would eliminate some of these anti nutrients and these contaminants on the celiac. Yeah, millets don't contain gluten, which is, of course, one of the issues with with those suffering from celiac disease. So because millets do not have gluten, they don't trigger episodes with those who have who have celiac disease. Millets often in any kind of more whole grain product also has prebiotics which are really important in feeding your microbiota. So the more we can consume whole grain products like Linda way who asked about the Japanese eating a lot of rice, moving towards more brown rice is really important because those whole grains are full of nutrients that your, your microbiome loves to consume and helps allow for that microbiota to grow in healthy ways and has all kinds of human health impacts. So millets, particularly these coarse grains are really important in feeding your microbiota and keeping it healthy and diverse. So this is the powerful FMCG or process food industry exerts until economic and political influences on the micro economic decisions that sometimes end up deciding the degree nature and behavior of emerging industries such as the minute one. How can food security and entrepreneurs work their way around this hurdle. That's an interesting question. And also, before you answer the question may I request all the participants. You know you can not just questions but we would request you, I mean we would request you to type the questions in the question and answer chat box. And in the webinar chat box we would request you to you know whatever information you have about millets and you would like to share with everybody, we would encourage you to do that in the chat box. Thank you. Over to you. Yeah, this is a tough question I mean the, the, the power dynamics of transnational companies and the kinds of foods they produce. It is a significant elephant in the room, shall we say, and how small and medium enterprises can can face these pressures that some of the industry players that have a lot more resources and are very involved in all levels of global food system governance, and their influence on governance is quite stark and it's an old question of power and balance but it's not going away. And how particularly small and medium entrepreneurs can get around this hurdle is challenging in the United States. And of course every country and their relationship with industry is different, I think in the United States. It's one of the most challenging because food industry is so powerful across all levels of government, and exerts their power across our entire food supply. So when you have local small farmers who are going up against some of these industry players. I think one level of power for many of the small holders and small scale food producers and processors is working at the local level and building from the community up. You know, will it change the entire global food system power and balance know, but where you see power sometimes is at the local community level. And that's important, because from that local level becomes that that growth can happen and that influence can happen. So I think for small and medium enterprises it's important to work at the local level and build from there. So, yes. That's my answer to that but it's a really hard. That's a hard question to answer and I'd be curious if Cuba has any insights on that because I, I feel this is the big elephant when you think about the UN Food Summit and everything else it's just one of these things that's incredibly difficult to tackle. Thank you very much no I think you've answered it very well then. It's a very difficult question to answer and you know the answer can be multiple and it's very complex and what we require is actually collaboration of different entities different organizations and at different levels coming together and some sort of a convergence and collaborative effort. I think that's something which can help not completely solve come up with a solution but at least move towards, you know, that can accelerate our movement towards promoting millets and making it more popular. This Karima's question that are your concerns about the environmental impact of increased millet cultivation such as land use changes, water consumption or soil degradation and I think there are, there is some linkage with the question, the last question which is given by Omar Nafis about third world countries like Pakistan where there is food shortage. So all these countries also have the similar issues, environmental issues. So maybe if you can combine these two questions and answer them. Yeah, thank you Karima and Omar. Now again I'm not an agronomist and I want to say that I think you know there's a lot of studies showing that millets have a much smaller environmental footprint than say rice or wheat. I think their carbon footprint is about 25% less than those other crop commodities. And there's a lot of data suggesting that millets conserve water. They, they're less agrochemicals are needed. But again that depends on probably the agronomy in the soil of where those are being grown. They don't really require a lot of water even in dry climates, and they can be grown in soils with high salinity. So they're quite resilient crops. Now the land use change is interesting. The issue is, is we're using about 40% of the earth's land to grow food. And, you know, there's a real significant debate about, how are we going to feed still a growing population by 2050 in the context of climate, without extensifying going into new landscapes, usually landscapes that are very biodiverse forest scapes for example. So, you know, how do we intensify landscapes in an environmentally sustainable way. So that that's the big question, regardless of the crop, whether we're moving into new crops like millets or traditional crops like millets or extensifying the typical crop commodities in and even fruits and vegetables to feed the world you know how do we do that in a more sustainably intensive way without extensifying into new landscapes. That's a big question. And there's a big switch that needs to happen that farmers are often, you know, farmers are risk adverse asking farmers to stop growing rice and start growing millet. It's, it's challenge so, but overall millets are quite resilient, particularly in dry regions to Omar. Great question. The Ukraine Russia crisis has put some of the major crops like wheat and other crops at very high market prices. This is a great example where two significant red basket countries go to war, you can see the ramifications on the entire global food system and food prices, and the implications on food security. Isn't it incredible just two countries have upended the global food system, along with climate change and extreme weather events, and the long tail of COVID COVID cases are going up where I live right now in New York again. We're having, and we're seeing constraints on the global food system. So again, this is a perfect reason why we need to move away from just a handful of crops and being so dependent on those crops to diversifying the crops that we grow and diversifying the kind of foods that we eat. Millets fit into this picture. So Mar and in Pakistan, could there be opportunities to grow more millet and be, and for particularly for countries where millet can grow in India can they be the major bread, there's already a major bread basket for the world feeds a lot of the world, but can it grow even more so, and, and create more demand for some of these other crops, as opposed to us relying so much on maize rice and wheat, which can have significant ramifications on global food prices and global food security. Thank you very much. There is, there are a couple of questions, couple more questions. So one is, but both of them are speaking about the nutrients. So by Arun and Mubashar Ali. So one is which millet has more nutrient value producing millet by using traditional process or by using current technology. And also need to know quality of soil and weather conditions for cultivation of it, and to get good quality products. And the other question is to millet contain phytic acid that can be hazardous for absorption of nutrients. And I think this is linked with, you know, the presentation that you made up made about your work. So, over to you. But on phytates yes they can contain phytates and that can bind these divalent cation nutrients like iron and zinc. So yes to that soil agronomy. I'm not the one to answer that I'm not an agronomist. Sorry about that. What was the first question to the audience is more nutrient value. But I think this question is related to producing millet by using traditional processes, or by using current technology. Yeah. As I showed in my presentation it really depends on the variety and of course it depends on the processing so not such an easy question to answer without going into some of the food processing technology but it can really vary by nutrient it can really vary by the variety and the processing that goes into this place. Yeah. And I'm happy to share my slides and the and the references that I have that go into some of the detail there was one paper that I had presented that goes into great detail about the nutrient composition, and how it changes with processing. In a textbook that you can, and if anyone can't download it I'm happy to send it. But there's a paper by use off at all in the food research international that looks at the functional changes during processing of different millet varieties. And then there was another paper in a book. I think it's open access called millets and millet technology produced by Springer in 2021 and that too goes in great detail about processing and how that changes the functionality and nutrient composition of different millets. Yeah, thank you very much. And in, you know, since there was a question related to traditional and modern technology. One of the problems using traditional technology is that because millets it's, it's, you know, the processing of millets the primary processing of millets after the harvest. It's a very tedious process, and it requires. Very strong instruments, or which can you know process them. And many times this traditional methods are not able to do it because of which the shelf life, even the shelf life of the millets cannot be stored, it's very short so you cannot once you've done the primary processing you're not able to store it for a very long time. And therefore, there are times when modern technologies are also required for that to today. And Chef Susan Senesi was able to was supposed to join us and give us a recipe on how to cook millets, but there are some, there is some network issue at her end because of which she's not able to join so we will have to skip that. But maybe I can just give the time to learn Lauren. Maybe if you can speak about little bit more about that. Let's make a couple comments. This is the third webinar in our series celebrating the international year of millets talking about the processing that issue that we were just talking about I encourage everybody to watch the second webinar. Chef Pierre TM has a international brand of phony and he talked a little bit about some of the processing challenges that they have encountered with that. Since that's a very small grained small colonel millet that you might find interesting if you were interested in that topic. Other than that, I just wanted to remind everyone that we do have a youth photography contest, and we're still accepting submissions until the end of the month on August 31. We have a link on Twitter or Instagram and you just have to use the hashtags internet IYM 2023 for international year of millets 2023 and the hashtag my millet and we ask everybody to tag at un SDSN. There's a link in the chat. If people want to grab it real quick. It's just the main SDSN website on all of our international year of millets events, and it has the full details on how to submit photos and the criteria for eligibility. And I'll just say thank you so much everyone for joining us today. Thank you so much Dr. Fonzo and Chewbub closing word. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much Lauren for that. Thanks to everybody for joining us today and there's, I think, Jessica has shared the talk, PPD on the chat so you can download that quickly. Thank you for this webinar ends and also some of you has mentioned about the presentation. As Lauren mentioned this is the third webinar, and we are also going to come up with a booklet booklet, which will be a combination of the talks that are given by the resource person including the recipes that has been shared by the chefs in the three different webinars. So we will be I think in touch with you and we have your emails. So once this is out then we'll share it with you the link. And we would request you to stay in touch and please do share about the photographic and search contest that is there, especially this is for the young people. So we would like to encourage all of you to request young people to be part of this because this is, we still have half a year left because it's just the start of August. Well, little bit less than half a year left for international year of millets and, but still, that means we have few more months to go where all of us it's an opportunity for all of us to come together and promote this wonderful food, which is nutritious and which is also very good for the environment. So promote it in whichever way we can. And let us come together and let us hope to meet you all for more such events in the future. Thank you very much to everybody. Thank you very much Professor fun so for your insightful talk, and also to Lauren for organizing this wonderful webinar series by the SDSM and thanks to everyone and have a good day to those who are in the morning time zone and good night to those who are in the evening time zone. Thank you.