Marketing defective food: Millets in Southern India

Abstract

Millets have recently re-emerged in India's food discourse, framed as a solution for sustainable agriculture and rural livelihoods. Their marketing is promoted as an opportunity for marginalized farmers. This article critically examines millet marketing as a case of the marketization of neglected and underutilized species (NUS), foregrounding the power dynamics it entails. Our findings from qualitative fieldwork in the greater Bangalore area point to four key processes: (i) academic narratives that shape entrepreneurial agendas and construct market needs, (ii) the positioning of millets at the frontier region of neoliberal markets, (iii) the establishment of Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) to make millets accessible to urban marketers, and (iv) marketing narratives that position millets as a traditional crop that can satisfy modern palates. We argue that understanding asset ownership and processes of assetization seem crucial to exposing potentially emerging power struggles caused by the marketization of millets. In addition, marketing narratives support these processes and stabilize power relations in the value chain in favor of downstream actors. These are important insight for the marketing of similar crops, which would make concerns about smallholders' loss of power during marketization processes more tangible and thus easier to challenge.