Bill Gates says malnourishment a concern, hails India’s bid to promote millets: ‘Have to change seeds that are grown’

Billionaire Bill Gates has said malnutrition is vastly underfunded and often ignored. He even feels that it has not been researched well and an understanding of malnourishment was only discovered in the last decade. 

“Mostly when you say the word malnourishment, people think of famines where there’s just not enough food and the kids are suffering from that,” he said in an interview with the Hindustan Times.

“But that’s not the primary cause of malnutrition. Malnutrition mostly is that you have these very limited diets and eventually your gut microbiome gets inflamed, and so you’re not able to absorb nutrition,” he added.

On being asked about the role of millets in tackling malnutrition, he praised India's effort to promote the cultivation of millets.

“As part of my last trip [to India], I got to see the work being done on millets and how that plays a role in an overall balanced, nutritious diet. Some traditional crops have very low productivity per hectare, and so unfortunately, that doesn’t work well,” Gates said 

“The good news on millets is that there has been work to raise the productivity quite a bit, and it doesn’t require as much water and it can deal with the higher temperature and it’s a valuable piece of the diet,” he added. 

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation releases Goalkeepers report every Septmber that tracks the progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. This year the report focused on malnutrition.

Gates mentioned that the foundation has funded many studies on malnutrition and discovered that many diets were missing essential vitamins, micronutrients and protein. He also emphasised the need to make nutrient-rich foods such as milk and eggs cheaper and educate families on diversifying their diets.

In terms of India, he said that stunting is still an issue which has not been solved yet. However, it is not as rampant as Africa. He emphasised the need to develop tools to understand the impact of malnourishment on brain development.

Climate crisis and malnutrition

When asked about the impact of climate crisis on malnutrition, Bill Gates said, “The biggest effect of climate change, the biggest damage it causes, is its effect on the food system.”

According to him, the most negative impact of the climate crisis is that it becomes harder to grow food and increases the number of years with very low harvests.

“... to build up resilience, India has various ways… the government makes sure food is available but you’re going to have to change the seeds that are grown. Change the varieties, adopt more productive varieties,” Bill Gates said.

However, he appreciated India’s improved mortality rates.

“Once we hit the pandemic, some countries went backwards, although India continues to make progress on improving mortality rates,” Gates said.