Stream diversion must be stopped.While learning how to pound poi at this year’s East Maui Taro Festival, I was told by kupuna that over one hundred years ago, you could overlook Wailua Mauka and your spirit would be filled by the sight of taro fields as far as you could see.
Now many of those fields are no longer producing. Why? Have the farmers lost interest in growing kalo? Has the community lost interest in eating poi? Hardly. It is mostly the lack of water that is preventing taro from being grown. Again you ask, “Have the rains stopped falling? Have the streams stopped flowing?”
No—the streams were diverted 150 years ago to the sugar and pineapple plantations. At the time, much of the community accepted it because sugarcane and pineapple economically supported Maui. So kalo took a back seat—waiting for his time to return. And now he is becoming impatient.
Tourism and construction have become the major economic engines of Maui. The large plantations don’t make money on their crops anymore. Two of the four major plantations have shut down. Furrow irrigation has been replaced by drip irrigation—which uses considerably less water—yet the same amount of water is still being diverted.
In East Maui, the stream flow is regulated by East Maui Irrigation, much to the chagrin of taro farmers. And in Central Maui, stream diversion has motivated the filing of the Na Wai ‘Eha contested case against Wailuku Water Company, which is taking so much water out that the four streams—Waihe‘e, Waikapu, ‘Iao and Waiehu—are no longer permanent.
And now, because the kalo hasn’t been nourished by cool fresh streams, it has been getting sick. There are those who then say that it now needs to be genetically modified to protect it from disease. Kalo is naturally strong, and if it is grown in the ‘aina, if it is touched by the sun and if it receives the water that should be in the fields, it will be as healthy as always.
There’s a Hawaiian proverb that says, “A person who plants kalo respects water. One who respects water respects life.” For the Hawaiian people, taro has always been a food and a part of culture. It is now time to give the water back to the kalo, back to the land, back to the people of Maui.