And, wow. I’d love to see them try to outlaw plant breeding of any species. Say goodbye to cultivated varieties, then.

As flowering and seed production rarely occurs, taro is propagated by setts (A), which consist of the lower 30-40 cm of the leaf stalk together with the top 1-3 cm of the corm, from sucker corms (B) and full corms (C).

So if you grow Taro with this method, you will rarely have a cross-pollination. What this also means is that the taro being grown will not be able to recombine and adapt to pests and diseases. I wonder how much actual taro breeding occurs in the world? The wikipedia page on Taro shows that taro production in Hawaii is on a sharp decline, pests and disease contributing along with human development. If Taro was driven from Hawaii by these problems, I wonder what the religious and cultural reaction would be?

Is anyone producing taro from seed in Hawaii? Or is this something that happen unintentionally (through “volunteers”) ?

“taro is used to make the starchy food poi AND is revered as an ancestor of the Hawaiian people.”

Ancesterovores! And THAT is legal?

I firmly believe it would actually be possible to get people (and possibly legislatures) to sign a petition (or bill) that bans “genetic recombination” in all species, domesticated or wild, for a given region. I’ve got all sorts of ways to describe it – the randomness, risk, profit motives, protecting the integrity of god’s green earth, you name it you came frame it.

I am reminded that when the famous Asilomar conference of 1975 agreed a moratorium on recombination in the laboratory, the wonderfully entertaining and insightful Sydney Brenner commented ruefully to the effect that his graduate students might have to find other places to amuse themselves as they waited for their experiments to proceed.