ASIA/INDIA - Tribal priestesses help preserve millet

ASIA/INDIA - Tribal priestesses help preserve millet
Niyamgiri (Agenzia Fides) – Until 60 years ago millet was grown in 40% of cereal producing land in India. Despite its enormous nutritive value of protein, vitamin B and minerals magnesium, potassium, zinc and copper, production of millet today has dropped to only 11% . According to data collected by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, FAO, production started to fall in recent decades with the country’s industrial development A country rich in mineral resources, relegated millet to ordinary grain, destined to serve as fodder for cattle and no longer a basic stable food for human beings. In the hills of Niyamgiri, Rayagada district in the east Indian state of Odissa, where undernourishment is widespread and hunger affects 83% of the population, women of the Dongria Kondh people, who live in the forests and who revere the surrounding mountains, and are firmly convinced of the benefits of millet grown on the slopes of the hills. The women perform ritual dances and songs for the god of the forest to have an abundant harvest. According to the ritual, the tribal priestesses, bejunis in the local dialect, start out from the village of Kadaraguma, at the foot of the Niyamgiri Hills, carrying earthenware jars on their heads, and in their hands a hen and a dove. They walk from door to door, from village to village encouraging and urging the people to return to millet their only heritage. On foot they visit people who grow the earliest varieties of millet, offering the hen and the dove to the local Bejuni and asking in exchange for quantities of seed to be shared equally among the five families of the village of the traveling priestesses. The millet is sown in the month of June. In exchange the priestesses offer the neighbours eight baskets of grain, double the amount of seeds received previously. Thanks to the rainfall, the harvest in the month of December is on average, 50 times the quantity of what was sown. The ritual has spread among other neighbouring communities, making it possible to protect two species of millet in danger of disappearing: khidi janh, similar to sorgo, in the village of Jangojodi, and kanga-arka, in the village Sagadi. India has one of the highest rates of hunger in the world. According to FAO, 195 million Indians are undernourished and the World Health Organization estimates that every year 1,300,000 of India’s children die for this reason. (AP) (28/7/2015 Agenzia Fides)