Diverted water leaves family, taro with trickle

By CHRIS HAMILTON, Staff Writer
HUELO -- Hidden amid the jungle and just up from the ocean, these 2 acres of green and fertile land contain 25 terraced taro patches that have been in Beatrice Kekahuna’s family for at least 150 years.

In communal harmony, four segments of the family worked and laughed late last week as they maintained five taro patches, or kalo loi, which are similar to rice paddies.

They said they want to grow much more of the versatile starchy staple of the Hawaiian diet.

But there isn’t enough water from Honopou Stream. So the family manicures the rest of the empty patches, and the dry earth remains cracked and scarred.

Family member and taro farmer activist Lyn

Scott said the problem illustrates the greater issue

of water control that has vexed her people for decades.

In the 1870s, the sugar plantation owner, Alexander & Baldwin, and its subsidiary, the East Maui Irrigation Co., began to block the natural flow of East Maui streams, eventually building a system of ditches, tunnels, flumes and pipes to collect surface water above Hana Highway and channel it to sugar cane fields in Central Maui. EMI continues to maintain the intricate and aging system.

A&B officials said they need the water for 35,000 acres of sugar cane cultivated and harvested by subsidiary Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co., which in turn provides jobs and tax dollars for the community. EMI also provides millions of gallons of East Maui water for use by Upcountry residents.

Ultimately, it is A&B that decides how much water to put back into the steams. As they weeded the loi with small hand sickles late last week, Beatrice and her son, Sanford Kekahuna, said that’s unfair.

“Some days, it is just a trickle,” Scott said. “Some days, we get flooded because someone at EMI left a gate open . . . They think we are just a few people. They think we would waste the water. But there would be more of us. We are an active community. And we wouldn’t take all the water.”

Scott is among a number of East Maui residents who, along with the Native Hawaiian Legal Corp., filed a petition seeking the release of more ditch water into streams seven years ago with the state Commission on Water Resource Management.

The commission staff will issue a report in June on whether to put more water into five East Maui streams. A hearing and recommendation by the seven-member panel is expected to follow soon after.

Scott said EMI releases about 200,000 gallons of water a day into the Honopou Stream. Activists want 1 million gallons per day. The water will also assist the flora and fauna, fill the stream’s pools and help bring back stream areas for fish to spawn and grow, she said.

The lava-stone terraces and aqueducts for the loi are found all over Hawaii, and historians and scientists consider them to be marvels of the ancient world.

The Kekahunas’ gravity-flow system of ditches is fed by the family’s own gravel, stone and concrete diversion from the stream. Imagine a sort of exit lane from the streambed.

PVC pipes carry some of the water on the property, and ditches run around the perfectly proportioned 25-by-80-foot taro patches. The water flows into a patch through a shoe-box-shaped entrance, which easily can be blocked, at one of the upper corners and exits at the far lower corner.

The feet of the farmers don’t sink far into the dense red soil. And each patch at the Kekahuna property requires only a few inches of water. Minnows and tadpoles dart around the pools.

But with an ongoing drought and intermittent amount of water released by EMI, the Kekahunas’ water isn’t constantly flowing, they said. Over the years, there has been less of it as well, they said.

Scott maintained that A&B is taking more and more water, an accusation the company has denied. Family members return their patch’s water to the stream and believe the water is cleansed by flowing through the loi.

It takes nine months to a year to grow a crop of taro fully. However, with a low flow of water through the taro patches lately, the water often warms above 77 degrees, Sanford Kekahuna said. At that temperature, the plant rots in what’s become its own deathbed.

The Kekahuna family sells a little taro to Maui Poi. Mostly, though, the family keeps what it grows to help feed themselves, Beatrice Kekahuna, 75, said. They want to sell more, she said.

“It’s our main source of food,” her son said.

They use it for poi and as pudding. The family boils, bakes or fries the potatolike tuber with garlic as well as in bread and cereal.

When family members pulled out the rotted taro, which smells as pungent as blue cheese, they cursed A&B.

“It’s greed,” said Beatrice Kekahuna.

• Chris Hamilton can be reached at chamilton@mauinews.com.