Summary

Taro has evolved as a food over several thousand years, as people in tropical areas have selected attributes that suit their needs. Those needs included both consumption and production factors, as well as processing techniques. In the Pacific area, where the taros are most widely used, the people have relied heavily on three forms, Colocasia, Alocasia, and Cyr-tosperma, along with the other starches such as yams, breadfruit, and bananas as the main elements in their daily diets, eaten together with a small accompanying dish. Xanthosoma taro has been added to this inventory in the last 200 years, as it will grow in poor soils and can be less acrid.

Vegetation propagation allowed a high degree of selectivity. Factors including the taste of the corm and its size, color, moisture, and acridity have determined over time which setts were replanted and which were discarded.

Most taro has been grown in dryland conditions. The selection of varieties of Colocasia taro that would grow in water is a further development, as is the very specialized technique for raising Cyr-tosperma taro on atolls where the salinity of the water is a problem.

Little development has taken place to diversify the edible product. The corms are peeled and cooked in an earth oven by steaming for a couple of hours and are then served in slices. More recently, boiling has been introduced, but it gives a less acceptable flavor.

Ongoing development of the taros was curtailed, to some extent, by colonial Europeans whose preferred food was bread. Taros and other root crops were considered by these newcomers as a mark of the backward nature of these societies, and the colonists introduced crops of a commercial nature, such as cotton, vanilla, sugar cane, and, more recently, coffee and cocoa. These crops were planted on the best land, and taros were relegated to less desirable areas. The result has been not only a loss of many varieties of taro formerly used but also a scarcity of taros for sale in the markets today over and above those needed for household supply.

Only during the last decade of the twentieth century have the root crops, including taro, merited the attention of agricultural specialists. The worldwide pressure for a more differentiated crop base than just the seven basic food crops has led to programs such as the FAO Root Crops Program and ACIAR’s identification of the potential of root crops in the South Pacific. With political independence in the 1960s and 1970s, small nations in the tropics have seen the need to become more self-reliant by reducing their high food import bills. The former importance of the taros has been recognized, and these countries are now taking steps to reestablish them agronomically and economically as a key local crop. The recognition of the importance to health of dietary fiber adds another dimension to taro’s desirability. Exports of taro to migrants in metropolitan areas have stimulated the need for particular farming expertise as well as the development of marketing and processing techniques.

Taro has survived a major hiatus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that might have seen it eliminated as a crop or dismissed as one of backward, underdeveloped tropical countries. But cereals, even rice, will not grow readily in many of these tropical areas, whereas the taros are a flexible crop that suits shifting cultivation so that farmers can vary the size of their crops from month to month depending on demand. Nutritionally, taro is very good, especially when complemented with fat from fish or pork. Given agronomic support, taro has great potential for further contributions to the world food supply, and finally, it is a crop that has endured thanks to people’s strong preference for it as their traditional food.

Nancy J. Pollock

Notes

1.  It is ironic that rice has been introduced into modern-day Pacific diets as an emergency foodstuff that is easily transferred from metropolitan countries as a form of food aid to assist cyclone-stricken nations, such as Samoa in 1991. As such, it forms a substitute for locally grown taro, which is badly affected by salt inundation and wind breaking off the leaves, thus causing the corms to rot.

2.  See Petterson (1977: 177) for a map of the spread of Xan-thosoma taro around central and northern South Africa in contrast with the spread of Colocasia taro in the same area.

3.  See Pollock (1992) for a listing of the importance of various starch staples in Pacific societies.

4.  See Barrau (1965: 69) for a map showing its origins and distribution in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

5.  Petterson (1977: 178); see also the map on p. 177.

6.  See Pollock et al. 1989 for preferences and consumption patterns of taros and other foods by those Samoans living away from their home islands in Wellington, New Zealand.

7.  See Chandra (1979) for a detailed discussion of marketing root crops.

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