Banaue rice terraces

Ifugao Province, Philippines
In the Banaue municipality of the northern Ifugao Province on the Philippine island of Luzon, the indigenous Igorot people have constructed 49,500 acres 20,000 hectares of agricultural land upon the inhospitable bedrock of the steep Cordillera Central Mountain Range. For millennia, succeeding generations of farmers built and maintained 12,500 miles 20,000 kilometers of dikes and retaining wallsenough to stretch halfway around the equatorcreating a unique, irregular patchwork of terraced rice paddies. The American anthropologist Roy Barton called these terraces and others in the regiona modification by man of the earths surface on a scale unparalleled elsewhere. The Cordillera rice terraces were added to UNESCOs World Heritage List in December 1995, a decision justified in the following terms:The fruit of knowledge passed on from one generation to the next, of sacred traditions and a delicate social balance, they helped form a landscape of great beauty that expresses conquered and conserved harmony between humankind and the environment. Moreover, they were cited asoutstanding examples of living cultural landscapes. The tiers rise to about 4,900 feet 1,500 meters above sea level. Each is defined by a stone or clay retaining wall, snaking along the contours of the steep mountainside. Stone walls are up to 50 feet high 15 meters: some of the clay walls are more than 80 feet 25.5 meters high. Some garden terraces have been backfilled with soil, ash, and composted vegetable material, while others have been simply carved from the rock and overlaid with soil washed down from the higher levels. Rice cannot be grown without large quantities of water, and the terraces are served by an elaborate irrigation system, comprising canals cut through the rock and bamboo and wooden aqueducts. Once the highest terraces are flooded, water spills over the descending walls until the whole hillside is irrigated. What of their builders? Igorot literally,the mountain people is a broad ethnic classification applied to a number of groups bound by common sociocultural and religious characteristicsIbaloy, Kankanay, Ifugao, Kalinga, Apayao, and Bontocwho occupy the Cordilleras. They originate from the warlike immigrants who reached the northern islands of the Philippines from Vietnam and China, some scholars believe 10,000 years ago. Their descendants eventually became rice farmers and, against the difficulties presented by the hostile topography, built their amazing tiers of rice fields on the precipitous mountainsides. The true age of the terraces remains in question: some sources suggest that the Igorot commenced them between 200 b.c. and a.d. 100, others that they date from at least 1000 b.c. As late as the 1990s rising nationalism had not permeated their tribal highlands, and the Igorots, while regarded as citizens, did not think of themselves as Filipinos. They were further alienated by the Marcos administrations dam-building schemes, which included flooding the mountain valleys in their Cordillera homelands. They continue to resist integration into Filipino society. The rice culture of the Igorot, central to their way of life, inevitably had a spiritual dimension. As Joaquin Palencia remarks,the adversarial nature of the geography of this region and the tremendous odds faced by the Ifugao to assure access to food