In May 2025, the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (TCI) announced its newest project, Promoting Value Chains for Climate Resilience and Nutritious Diets. TCI researchers will map and analyze the value chains for key nonstaple food groups in India—coarse grains, horticultural produce, pulses and oilseeds. Through their analysis, they will identify challenges and inefficiencies along the value chains and recommend options for addressing them. By helping to bolster these value chains, TCI aims to support agricultural diversification in order to improve India’s nutrition outcomes and make its food systems more resilient to a changing climate.

TCI’s news team recently sat down with TCI Director Prabhu Pingali to discuss this new project and the important role that value chains play in India’s food systems.

What are food value chains?

That’s very complicated. In my view, a food value chain is everything that goes from producing food on a plot of land to getting it to the consumer’s plate. And, one can even say, to the end, nutritional outcome.

From the TCI point of view, we’re looking not just at the physical part of the value chain, but at the outcomes. A lot of TCI’s work looks at the nutritional impact of the value chain, how diets change, and what’s been the health effects of those value chains. We look at that variable to see what changes are needed at the start. We need diversity at the farm level if you want to address nutrition outcomes. That’s where our focus on getting away from staple grains comes from. Our work also looks at the increased consumption of processed foods, and we’ve argued that the reason you see so much processed food consumption is that it’s easy to access—it’s cheap. You can get it anywhere and it addresses time costs for consumers, especially food preparation. If you can improve the value chains and make fresh food more accessible, then you reduce some of these problems with access to food. And then you also think about how to create more labor-saving technologies for food preparation to address the time costs. So, when we think about value chains, we are thinking more broadly, not just about all the steps involved, but about the outcomes of value chains themselves.

How can value chains help India to diversify its agricultural system?

At the farm level, there’s a need to get away from this focus on staples, which has fundamentally been a concerning factor in diversifying the production system. By bolstering the supply chains that bring nonstaple crops to consumers, we can incentivize their production and make them more accessible. To achieve this, there has to be significant investments across the entire value chain, all the way from the farm to the plate. You need investments in storage, transport, quality control, safety, etc., at all steps of the chain, from post-farmgate, to wholesale, to processing, all the way to the retail markets. Private sector investments along this entire chain are lacking and government regulations for ensuring the quality and safety of produce, especially perishable products, is absolutely crucial. You also need investments in power and transport in order to get fresh produce to the market safely.

Why are value chains for staples like rice and wheat so much stronger in India than those for other crops, like perishable fruits and vegetables?

It’s because there’s a very strong government infrastructure around the procurement, processing and delivery of rice and wheat, especially the subsidized food grain supply system—the Public Distribution System, or PDS. If you did not have this procurement system in place, you would not have such strong value chains. Right now, there is no other value chain in India—possibly dairy, which comes close—but no others that equal the staple grain value chains.

What role can value chains play in issues like environmental sustainability and helping to reduce the impact of climate change?

In a sense, very little. But one can imagine moving some areas out of rice and wheat toward growing pulses, millets, oilseeds, etc., which are more climate-resilient and reduce emissions, and are therefore more sustainable. But, if the value chains lead to more horticultural crops with high levels of chemical inputs, then you are not going to see much of an environmental benefit.

How will TCI’s new project, Promoting Value Chains for Climate Resilience and Nutritious Diets, lead to stronger value chains?

A: I think that the advantage of the TCI project is that we take a scientific approach, looking at the entire value chain from soil health to human nutrition, and we map out the major value chains for the big food groups in the country. We can identify the constraints along the value chains that are preventing the free flow of food and say, “Here are ways in which one can alleviate those constraints.” It can be through policy, technology, infrastructure or institutional changes.

Can you give an example of a potential value chain intervention that would yield benefits?

A: Investment in cold storage systems can lead to much better access for farmers to get their goods into local markets. There’s a great incentive for the private sector to invest in those markets if there’s cold storage systems in place, which can keep produce fresh as it moves to retail.

What is the methodology by which TCI researchers are going to identify value chain constraints?

A: We’re looking at four major crop groups (coarse grains, horticultural produce, pulses and oilseeds), which are nonstaple and have very high implications for both farm income and diversification, but also for healthy diets in India. These are crop groups that, while they are nutritionally and economically relevant, face the most challenges along the value chain, namely perishability, quality, remunerations to farmers, etc. So, by mapping the value chains for these particular commodities, we identify pain points and can give policy recommendations as to where they need to be addressed. By doing this, we can develop more resilient value chains for these commodities, which will have very good nutritional health and economic outcomes for actors across the value chain. So, there is a health component, there is an economics component, but there is also an environmental component when you do it effectively and efficiently.

Who are some of the stakeholders that you might meet with in the course of this research?

Because we are looking at the life cycle of particular produce, from production all the way to consumption, there’s a wide variety of stakeholders involved, and one major component of the mapping exercise is identifying who they are and what influence they have within value chains. What we are expecting to see is everyone from agricultural scientists who conceptualize what variety of seeds need to be developed, to the farmers, to the agricultural market participants, all the way to the retail segments, to final consumers. So, we’re looking at a really wide variety of actors, and what this exercise will also do is identify the major challenges and opportunities for these stakeholders. The end goal, of course, is to bolster the supply chains to benefit those stakeholders and, in the end, create better outcomes for consumers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Feature image: Bags of grain at a wholesale market in Madhya Pradesh, India. (Photo by Mathew Abraham/TCI)