India can sustainably enhance its food supply if its farmers plant less rice and more nutritious and environmentally-friendly crops, including finger millet, pearl millet, and sorghum, according to a new study from the Data Science Institute at Columbia University.
India can sustainably enhance its food supply if its farmers plant less rice and more nutritious and environmentally-friendly crops, including finger millet, pearl millet, and sorghum, according to a new study from the Data Science Institute at Columbia University.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that diversifying crop production in India, in this case replacing some rice—India’s main crop—with millets and sorghum, would make the nation’s food supply more nutritious while reducing irrigation demand, energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions. Such diversification of crops would also enhance India’s climate resilience without reducing calorie production or requiring more land.
"To make agriculture more sustainable, it’s important that we think beyond just increasing food supply and also find solutions that can benefit nutrition, farmers, and the environment. This study shows that there are real opportunities to do just that," says Kyle Davis, an environmental data scientist at the Data Science Institute at Columbia University and lead author of the study.
With nearly 200 million undernourished people in India as well as widespread groundwater depletion and the need to adapt to climate change, increasing the supply of nutri-cereals may be an important part of solving India’s food shortage, Davis says.
Read more at Data Science Institute at Columbia
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