Native interests and the biotech industry are locked in a battle in Hawaii. At the center is taro, a vegetable most of us on the mainland have never even heard of.

Taro is a tropical plant whose corm may be cooked and eaten - in Hawaii it’s a staple, the basis for the dish poi. While taro currently comprises only 1 percent of agricultural lands in the state, it is considered the most significant cultural crop in Hawaii. With a diet very dependent on taro, early Hawaiians bred more than 300 varieties of the plant, called kalo in the Hawaiian language. (Today, less than 75 kinds are found on the islands.) This reliance on taro extends throughout Polynesia, so in the 1990s when Samoan farmers saw their crops devastated by leaf disease, they turned to University of Hawaii researcher Eduardo Trujillo to find a more rapid way to save the vegetable: make disease-resistant varieties.

But modifying taro is highly controversial because the plant is regarded as sacred. According to Hawaiian mythology, Sky Father and Star Daughter bore a stillborn and deformed boy. When they buried him, out of the ground came taro. Then they had another son who is considered the progenitor of the Hawaiian people - and he was charged with minding his older brother forever. Because of this link between the plant and the people, selling it is considered a direct insult to Hawaiian culture and ancestry.

Genetically altering taro is much worse. Starting in 2003, Trujillo and his team began mixing Hawaiian taros with Samoan taro and other grains to create three breeds. Native activists said that the University of Hawaii, which maintained patents not just on the three Trujillo-created GMO taro but also on three hybrid varieties from 2002, was giving away an integral part of the culture. The university held 13 licenses to grow or use the GMO breeds for commercial purposes. “The concept of turning life into intellectual property is foreign to Hawaiian culture,” said Walter Ritte, a native Hawaiian activist.

Opposition to the agreements and patents gained momentum, culminating in protests by farmers, students, and anti-GMO activists. In the summer of 2006, the university agreed to give the patents up completely to public commons. According to Hawaii SEED, an anti-GMO organization, Hawaiians are now trying to gain control of more than 75 varieties of taro by creating living repositories to preserve the breeds left on the island and by creating laws banning future modifications.

The university can currently continue to genetically engineer taro and possibly release any new breeds. However, legislation working its way through the state House of Representatives and Senate would instate a 10-year moratorium on growing, cultivating, and testing genetically engineered taro, with the House bill adding GMO coffee to the ban. A similar bill was narrowly defeated in the Senate last year, but some observers think this version will become the first law regarding GMOs in Hawaii. - Heather Bourbeau