At 73, retired teacher Maria Galeon still treks the footpaths of Nagacadan village in Kiangan, Ifugao, acting as volunteer tour guide to share her passion: Spreading her knowledge of her people’s culture, which centers on the Ifugao rice terraces, widely regarded as the eighth wonder of the world.
“We try our best to educate our youth about the value of even the smallest parcel of land that they receive as inheritance,” Galeon says as she stands at the center of about a kilometer’s stretch of rice terraces. From its base, the terraces look like a contoured brownish-green staircase on the mountain slopes of Nagacadan.
Like most Ifugaos, Galeon is taking matters into her own hands by helping preserve the terraces. She spends much of her postretirement years attending to the demands of her role as one of Ifugao’s indigenous knowledge holders.
For Galeon, a public school teacher for 40 years, transferring her knowledge of Ifugao customs and traditions to the younger generation is the best way to advocate the principle that preserving the rice terraces is not just about the rebuilding of their walls, but more so about saving the people’s rich cultural heritage.
“If we do not act now, the toils of our forefathers, passed on for many generations, will be lost forever. It is not only the loss of the Ifugaos nor the Filipinos; it is the loss of all the peoples of the world,” she says.
World heritage
The Ifugao rice terraces were once again in the news in the past weeks over reports of eroded and buried paddies that were either caused or aggravated by recent typhoons that hit northern Luzon.
Among those that were heavily damaged were the five terraces clusters in Banaue, Kiangan, Hungduan and Mayoyao towns, all inscribed in the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco).
The Unesco inscription cited the Ifugao terraces as “a landscape of great beauty that expresses the harmony between humankind and the environment” and “the fruit of knowledge handed down from one generation to the next, the expression of sacred traditions and a delicate social balance.”
Alarm
But Ifugao officials and residents have raised the alarm on the urgent need to repair portions of the terraces.
Local government officials, as well as the province’s nongovernment organizations, are leading a campaign to raise funds to repair the terraces and mitigate the looming extinction of what the Unesco describes as “priceless contribution of Philippine ancestors to humanity.”
“We have to keep in mind that more than just a tourist destination or a cultural symbol, the terraces are primarily a source of food not only for Ifugaos but for many Filipinos. So this is a matter of national, if not of international, concern,” says Ifugao Rep. Teodoro Baguilat Jr.
Notified of the recent damage to the terraces, Unesco’s World Heritage Center, in its website, says it is “exploring all possible means to respond to this situation as quickly as possible.”
Estimates by the Ifugao Cultural Heritage Office (Icho) showed that 102,663 cubic meters from the rice terraces, an amount of soil that could fill more than 8,500 six-wheel dump trucks, were washed out. A total of 5.1 km of communal irrigation canals need urgent repair.
The damaged terraces in the affected heritage sites need P122 million to restore, Icho said.
Worst-hit among the world heritage sites are the rice terraces in Batad village in Banaue, a popular destination among foreign and local tourists for their amphitheater-like formation. The terraces now bear a 15-meter wide, dagger-shaped gash of eroded earth that buried at least 32 layers stretching about 200 meters downhill.
Also sustaining severe damage are the heritage sites in Baang, Hapao and Nunggulunan villages in Hungduan, Nagadacan in Kiangan and Chumang in Mayoyao.
Little support
Marlon Martin, chief operations officer of the Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement (Sitmo), laments that despite all the hard work that farmers endure in preserving the terraces, they get little support from government or even the international community.
“The Ifugao rice terraces have been promoted as a tourism destination, but the people in the communities are unprepared. No programs are given to the farmers who keep the treasure that tourists have been coming to see,” Martin says.
Farmers in the heritage sites share stories of the pattern by which small patches of land in the terraces have reached a state of neglect and are now slowly turning into vegetable farms, grasslands or second-growth forests.
When rains come, the strong surge of runoff water from the watershed forests above the terraces either scours or erodes the “alak” (irrigation canals) and buries nearby patches of rice land.
For an Ifugao family that depends on the rice terraces for a year round supply of rice, the lack of irrigation water may mean zero harvest for the year.
Backbreaking
Batad farmer Ramon Binalit, 50, says the backbreaking burden of building, repairing and maintaining the rice terraces has been borne through many generations by Ifugao villagers through the traditional “ubbo,” their version of “bayanihan” (community cooperation), even with little or no support from outside.
“This tradition lives through until today. We can rebuild our terraces for as long as we can and up to where our resources would allow. But the damage is getting bigger and the repairs becoming more costly and difficult,” Binalit says.
The task becomes even tougher for farmers like Galeon, who, hampered by old age, now has to hire a team of laborers who would break up boulders in the nearest river to produce the stones for the terraces’ walls, haul these up to the damaged rice farm, remove eroded soil and re-mold the stonewalls, all with their bare hands.
With the escalating cost of living even in the upland communities of Ifugao, farmers admit that income from tilling the terraces could no longer meet their needs, especially the cost of sending their children to school.
Many Ifugao farmers are forced to leave the village—and their rice farms—in search for livelihood opportunities either at the town center, in Baguio City, or in the neighboring provinces of Nueva Vizcaya, Isabela and Quirino.