Have you read any front page news headlines that inform you to please shift your staple food from rice and wheat to other grains recently?
Have you heard anyone discuss on the amount of toxins that we ingest into our body through the various foods that we consume on television lately?
Did you come across any advertisement as to what will be staple food for your children in 15 years from now?
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None of these have happened. All of these ought to happen if only we take the recently released report by scientists from six of the top agricultural universities and research institutions across India seriously. The magnitude of the paper has not hit the mainstream as yet. What is it that this paper is saying??
In plain speak, it says that the staple diet of majority of Indians, viz., rice and wheat have lost their nutrition supplying capacity and they are laden with toxic chemicals.
It states this in the context of the high yielding varieties that have been introduced by the government since 1960s in the name of Green Revolution. These are the varieties that have been developed with big investments from the Government of India, promoted aggressively through outreach programmes and advertisements, held out year after year as an accomplishment by the agricultural universities, and, continue to be celebrated for their ''record breaking'' yields.
The report basically admits to the fact that, while yield has increased, the nutrition that the crops deliver to the consumers has drastically reduced in most essential minerals. It makes a projection and states that at this rate by 2040 the staple crops will be 'impoverished', i.e., incapable of providing any nutrition to the consumers.