Taro is one of the few crops that thrives standing in floodwater
Along with rice and lotus, taro can grow in flooded fields, and paddy-grown plants yield roughly double the dry-land crop. Humans may have been exploiting this starchy corm for tens of thousands of years, and Austronesian voyagers carried it across the Pacific, where it became a Polynesian staple.
Colocasia esculenta is a tropical perennial of the arum family, grown mainly for its starchy corm, though leaves and stalks are eaten too. Its big heart-shaped leaves, up to 40 by 25 centimetres on stalks as tall as 1.2 metres, earn it the garden name elephant ears. Linnaeus described two species, but most botanists now treat them as one highly variable plant. The genus name traces to an ancient Greek word for lotus root, and esculenta is Latin for edible.
The English word taro was picked up from Māori after Captain Cook saw plantations in New Zealand in 1769; Hawaiians say kalo and Samoans talo. The plant probably originated in the Indomalayan region, perhaps eastern India, Nepal and Bangladesh, and is so varied that wild and cultivated forms are hard to tell apart. It may have been domesticated several times, in New Guinea, mainland Southeast Asia or northeastern India.
Archaeology pushes use back very far: traces from Kilu Cave in the Solomon Islands date to roughly 28,000 to 20,000 years ago, and Kuk Swamp in New Guinea shows it between about 8250 and 7960 BC, though whether those plants were wild or farmed is unknown. Austronesians took it into the Pacific from around 1300 BC; Polynesians preferred it over other taro-like plants because it carried fewer irritating crystals. It reached Madagascar by the first century AD.
Today it ranks fifth among root and tuber crops. World output in 2022 was 18 million tonnes, 46 percent of it from Nigeria. Cyprus grows a protected-origin variety, and on the Greek island of Ikaria it helped feed people during the Second World War. In Australia and the southeastern United States, escaped plants are treated as invasive weeds.
Source: Taro
