Rice survives extreme weather, studies show

BAGUIO CITY—The government’s effort to restore eroded rice terraces in Ifugao and Mt. Province has been complemented with a study that aims to understand how rice grown on these mountain farms survived erratic weather patterns, a top agriculture official said here on Sunday.

Scientists have been tapped to study the genetic and physical attributes of heirloom rice, like the Ifugao “tinawon” and the Kalinga “unoy,” said Dante de Lima, director of the national rice production program of the Department of Agriculture.

On Friday, De Lima accompanied Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala, who inspected the damaged rice terraces of Batad village in Banaue, Ifugao, which were one of five terraces enshrined by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) as World Heritage Sites in 1995.

The terraces started to suffer rock slides and mudslides due to heavy rains dumped by recent typhoons.

De Lima, who attended a farmers’ forum here, said the agency is investing in the restoration of ancient terraced farms, but has not considered aiding farmers with hybrid rice stocks that were developed to survive extreme weather patterns.

“You already have 2,000-year-old rice that survived weather changes. We do not need to breed new rice for the terraces or the upland farms because farmers there plant [weather-resistant] rice,” he said.

The fact that tinawon (which Ifugaos planted once a year) survived the ages is proof of its resilience, which is why government scientists have started researching how it was able to adapt to climate changes of previous eras, De Lima said.

He said the DA has observed that many Cordillera farmers have learned to plant conventional rice stocks to increase yield but agency officials feared that this would lead to the extinction of heirloom rice varieties.

De Lima said the terrace farms are also the subject of a survey that would determine the volume of harvest each plot is expected to yield.

Based on initial observations, some DA researchers suspect that the rice terraces, which collapsed, could have been overused because some farmers may have been driven to raise more rice to fulfill an export demand, he said.

Heirloom rice has been shipped to a United States grains trader by Rice Inc., an organization advocating the propagation of indigenous rice varieties.

De Lima said these export transactions are only on an experimental basis because government is more inclined to keep heirloom rice a specialized domestic commodity.

He said each terrace plot may not be able to yield five tons of rice each season to sustain the Philippines’ annual rice supply, but the government makes little distinction between upland and lowland farmers when it sets production targets. Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon