Axion protection from flavor

The QCD axion fails to solve the strong CP problem unless all explicit PQ violating, Planck-suppressed, dimension n < 10 operators are forbidden or have exponentially small coefficients. We show that all theories with a QCD axion contain an irreducible source of explicit PQ violation which is proportional to the determinant of the Yukawa interaction matrix of colored fermions. Generically, this contribution is of low operator dimension and will drastically destabilize the axion potential, so its suppression is a necessary condition for solving the strong CP problem. We propose a mechanism whereby the PQ symmetry is kept exact up to n = 12 with the help of the very same flavor symmetries which generate the hierarchical quark masses and mixings of the SM. This axion flavor protection is straightforwardly realized in theories which employ radiative fermion mass generation and grand unification. A universal feature of this construction is that the heavy quark Yukawa couplings are generated at the PQ breaking scale.