Food and Medicine by What Name? Ethnobotanical and Linguistic Diversity of Taro in Africa

Taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott) is a tropical plant of Asian origin, which is now extensively cultivated in Africa, with Nigeria and Cameroon providing 60% of the worldwide production. Despite the economic role and long history of taro in Africa, there is no structured information available on the morphological diversity, cultivation, trade, culinary, and medicinal uses associated with this crop in Africa. This paper presents the results of a literature review of taro in Africa using the references stored in the Prelude database of African medicinal plants, to provide a more comprehensive picture of the current scientific knowledge on the utilization of this crop. Our results include information found in the African floras, published papers, as well as in the gray literature sources, and they show that taro is not only a food crop known under a large diversity of names that vary by region, but it is also widely used as a medicinal plant to cure human and animal diseases. The many local names applied to taro almost never have a correspondent morphological description in the literature. Combined genetic and ethnobotanical studies of this crop in Africa are needed to link cultivars to cultivation techniques, medicinal and culinary uses.