Millets: Crops for Climate Resilience and for Food and Nutritional Security

This edited volume discusses each millet, its climate resilience and nutrition supplementation properties in detail and help to understand and think forward the future studies.

Millets, often called Nutri-cereals, are easily digestible, gluten-free, having low glycemic index, and are high in antioxidants. The ever-changing global climate and water shortages also direct humans to look for alternative food for stable cereals like rice. Millets are a good fit for harsh climates, especially water and fertilizer shortages. The major reasons for decrease in the consumption of millets are the lack of production techniques, lack of awareness of nutritional merits and lack of processing technologies of millets. It has become imperative to reorient the efforts on the millets crop to generate demand through value-addition of processed foods, nutritional evaluation and creation of awareness, so that human and animal health can be maintained sustainably. Millets have the potential nutritional, pharmaceutical properties that fulfill the requirement of the habitat, and obviate dependence on major food crops. Millets will become alternative crops to feed ever-growing new mouth to feed. This book provides a comprehensive source of theoretical and practical updates about climate resilience and the nutrition supplementation roles of millets. It also covers the production, marketing, and value-added product development of millets.

This book is a valuable resource for scientists, teachers, agriculturists, capacity builders, the food industry, and policymakers and will serve as additional reading material for undergraduate and postgraduate students of life science.

Dr. Stanislaus Antony Ceasar is a Senior Scientist, Division of Plant Molecular Biology & Biotechnology, Rajagiri College of Social Sciences, Kochi, India. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Madras and postdoctoral training from the University of Leeds, UK (Marie Curie Fellow) and the University of Liege, Belgium. He has been working on millets for the past two decades. Dr. Ceasar is interested in studying millet to improve food and nutrient security amidst climate change and population explosion. His group has been developing genetic transformation and genome editing protocols for many millets. His group also studies nutrient transport and abiotic stress tolerance mechanisms of millets by applying genetic and genomic tools. He is on the editorial board of international journals such as BMC Genomics, Agriculture (MDPI), and he is a guest editor for a special collection on millets in Planta. Dr. Ceasar published over 100 articles and book chapters on millets.

Prof. Suprasanna Penna, Ph.D. in Genetics, is currently a Professor and Director at the Amity Institute of Biotechnology, Amity University Maharashtra, Mumbai; is an IAEA Expert; formerly, Head of Nuclear Agriculture and Biotechnology Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai. He made significant contributions to plant science, plant biotechnology, mutation breeding, and novel biopolymers. His work on technology on radiation depolymerized oligo-chitosan has been successfully used in enhancing plant productivity. He has also contributed to molecular understanding of abiotic stress tolerance in crop plants and salinity-adaptive mechanisms in halophytes. He is on the editorial board of national and international journals and published over 430 publications and has edited several books on salinity tolerance, mutation breeding and plant-metal interactions.

Prof. Carlos W. Piler Carvalho is a food researcher at Embrapa Food Technology, Brazil. Received an M.Sc. in Food Science and Technology in 1994 from the Federal University of Viçosa, Brazil, and a Ph.D. in 2001 from Nottingham University in Food Sciences, United Kingdom. He is currently a professor of the Food Science and Technology Post-Graduate Program at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. He has a scholarship from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) as a recognized food researcher and has received the title of Scientist of the State of Rio de Janeiro as a scholarship conceded by the Carlos Chagas Foundation for Research Support of Rio de Janeiro as recognition of his research contribution. He was a visiting scientist in the USA at USDA ARS/ERRC in 2005. He has published 168 articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Prof. S. Mohan Jain is a consultant and plant biotechnologist in the Department of Agricultural Sciences at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. He received an M.Phil. in 1973 and a Ph.D. in 1978 from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Israel and the USA and a visiting scientist/professor in Japan, Malaysia, Germany, and Italy. He was a technical officer, plant breeding and genetics, at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Vienna, Austria, from 1999 to 2005. He is a member of the International Association of Plant Tissue Culture and Biotechnology and an editorial board member of Euphytica, In Vitro, and Propagation of Ornamental Plants. He has more than 225 publications in journals, book chapters, and conference proceedings, and has edited 71 books and acted as a chairperson in several international conferences. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in commemoration of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005 to the IAEA.