The first time Thaís Barbosa dos Santos saw millets, it was on the shelf of a store that sold animal feed. She was still a child then, growing up in the Southeast of Brazil, and she had no connection to the grain that could suggest it would become the centre of her career.
Today, Thaís is a food engineer specialized in pearl millets. This means she studies the nutrients of specific kinds of millets, like their proteins and carbohydrates, and how best to process them into food products that people will want to buy and eat.
In the regional context, that puts her at the vanguard of a system change that could profoundly alter the agricultural and nutritional landscape in Brazil and beyond.
“Unlike many African and Asian countries that use millets as the basis for human food, here in Brazil people commonly just see them as animal feed and soil cover,” she explains. “Their potential for agriculture and human nutrition is still not widely known. And that includes the rest of Latin America, too.”
That is why, in addition to her research, she promotes millets to students by teaching professional courses in nutrition.
“Millets hold great potential for combating hunger”, she says, “especially pearl millets, because it’s so high in protein – higher than rice and corn.” It’s also gluten free, so it’s great for celiac patients.
At the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro and Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, she also studied the benefits of a new hybrid variety of millets. And she is keen to share her findings with producers, she says. Hybrid varieties combine the best traits of two or more different millets into one.
“Now that I finished my doctorate, I intend to encourage small local producers to produce mainly pearl millets,” she says. She especially likes the 9070 hybrid she studied, because it’s very productive, profitable and needs little water.
And this is where she sees an important development dimension to her work. “In areas like the Northeast of Brazil”, she says, “where other commercial crops struggle under extreme heat and water deficit, millets could really add to economic growth in the region.”
Ultimately, it’s about embracing the past as much as it is about the future. “Our ancestors had a diversified diet. So why not diversify again and get to know nutritious grains like pearl millets?”
