The Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras,

a landscape living on borrowed time

Augusto Villalón
Chair, ICOMOS Philippine Committee
Member, ICOMOS Executive Committee

Learning from World Heritage: Lessons in International Preservation and

Stewardship of Cultural and Natural Resources of Global Significance
The 7th US/ICOMOS International Symposium
Natchitoches, Louisiana, USA
25-27 March 2004

“The farming calendar provides the warp or the structure of the year, whilst
ceremonies, beliefs, and customs provide the weft, building up the patterns
of the brightly coloured cloth that is life in South-East Asia.”1

Records show that rice has been cultivated in Asia for 7,000 years. During that long
period, culture and cultivation have been interwoven with each other. The rice growing
landscape interlocks agriculture, environment, and cultural practices that sustain traditional
methods of site management. It is the combination of those factors, a totality that
influences the paddied landscape, demonstrating that rice cultivation has evolved its own
visual, spatial, cultural, and environmental organization.

Instead of blending into the landscape, rice cultivation sculpts the landscape to suit
the crop’s needs, creating an unmistakable landscape pattern. The fact that rice
germinates in flat, flooded paddies results in an almost uniform landscape found in all rice-
growing cultures. The paddy landscape dominates the deltas and flood plains of Asia’s
great rivers: the Mekong, the Chao Phraya, the Yangtze, the Ganges, the Irrawaddy, and
the Hongshui (Pearl) Rivers.

Woodlands and bamboo groves have been felled and the land ploughed flat to
provide the expanses needed to cultivate rice. To shore up the bunds and low dikes

1
Piper, Jacqueline M, Rice in South-East Asia: Cultures and Landscapes, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1993
between paddies, fruit trees and palms, especially coconuts and sugar palms, are planted.
Rice and water, palms and fruit trees, stretching from horizon to horizon, make up the
landscape that the people of rural Asia have known for centuries. The paddy landscape is
unquestionably a cultural landscape, the unifying visual and cultural icon that ties Southeast
Asian countries into the rice culture that they share.

A cultural landscape is the result of a long and continued interaction between

humankind and nature. The qualities that make each cultural landscape unique are the
physical manifestations of the indelible imprint of humankind on the environment
surrounding him, how man responds to the environment. To cultivate rice, man developed
paddied fields. That is the imprint of rice on the environment, or the cultural landscape of
rice cultivation.

For centuries, the cultural landscape of rice has remained the same. Paddies have
always been a continuing series of flat sections of land enclosed by bunds or low dikes
usually built of packed earth, stretching out to the horizon on flat land, or stepping up or
down in response to the slope of rolling land. No matter what the contour is of the land
where rice paddies are built, the paddy itself must be level since it must be flooded during
the rice-planting season. When flat or rolling land is not available, paddies cut into the
contours of hilly land, at times rising in steps along steep mountain slopes.

The rice landscape changes at each stage of the growth cycle. Paddies mirror the
sky when flooded with water at planting time. The mirrors disappear as flooding evaporates
when the rice grows to maturity. Paddies turn into fields of intense green during the growth
cycle and mature to golden yellow at harvest time, after which the mud in paddies is left to
dry and paddies are left bare for a few months so the soil recuperates before the planting
cycle resumes. Paddy, or wet-land farming, is carried out in tranquil, majestic landscapes
fashioned in every detail by the hand of man. These man-made landscapes are absolutely
beautiful and immensely serene.

The rice landscape, a result of an interconnection of agricultural, environmental, and

cultural practices, is an enduring cultural landscape that continues to exist until this day,
continuing to be used for the same purpose for which it was developed. It is a landscape
that sustains an agricultural population whose existence revolves around rice cultivation.

That the paddy landscape continues its usefulness, that it maintains its original form,
and that it is where a resident culture has consistently been the primary force that assures
its continuation, are all factors that classify this type of cultural landscape as an “organically
evolved, continuing cultural landscape” appearing as Category 2 for cultural landscapes in
the Operational Guidelines of the World Heritage Convention.

Among the other cultural landscape classifications that exist, ‘associative’ cultural
landscapes mark sites of present or former religious significance (e.g. holy mountains and
sacred groves); and ‘relic’ cultural landscapes (e.g. archaeological sites) mark the physical
remains of long vanished civilizations. In both classifications life is absent, unlike the
‘continuing’ cultural landscape where life on the site must continue so that the landscape
can live.

Why conserve the paddied landscape? The paddied landscape is unique. It tells the
story of the importance of rice cultivation to Asians. It is an icon held in common by all
Asians. Many of its outstanding examples are reaching the endangered point.

The more common paddied landscape is seen in the great river deltas where rice is
grown in commercial quantities for national or export consumption. From these plantations
grow the traded rice produced by sophisticated agricultural methods. Rice grown in this
manner, particularly in the United States, in Europe (mostly Spain and Italy) and in India
lead world production. Commercial rice need not be grown in wholesale methods.
However, production from small, rural farms in Thailand and other Southeast Asian
countries likewise produces a surplus of rice for export purposes. The landscape of
commercial rice production faces no danger or extinction and in fact flourishes at the cost of
putting traditional rice cultivation at an economic disadvantage. Reflecting their affluence
generated by new agricultural methods, the lifestyle of the farming population in commercial
rice plantations has exchanged the traditional with the modern. Traditional rice growers
have been relegated to remote areas.
 In most of Southeast Asia, rice is commonly grown mainly by rural farmers with small
land holdings. Most of their harvest is retained for family needs. They sell whatever is left
to subsidize other necessities. These farmers struggle to continue with their traditions. It is
in these landscapes where the relationship of man and nature is still evident but is
becoming endangered, where modernization threatens traditional practices, and survival is
at stake.

The farm villages situated in rice growing areas of Southeast Asia are an important
component of the landscape. The architecture of rice is completely green. It takes all of its
cues from its rural environment. The houses of the paddy landscape are traditionally built
from the materials that surround them: framed in wood, walled and floored with bamboo,
and roofed with either thatched grass or nipa palm shingles. It is ecologically sustainable
as well. The thick roof insulates from the heat of the sun. Usually raised on stilts off the
ground to safeguard its inhabitants from the monsoon floods, the shaded area beneath the
house is a room without walls provides shelter from sun and rain to allow the family to stay
outdoors most of the day. The house breathes. Its woven bamboo walls and floors of
bamboo slats allow air to circulate freely to cool the interior of the house. It is a totally
green house constructed from natural materials available in its vicinity and completely
attuned to environmental concerns.

It is an architecture that traces its vernacular form to the ancient Austronesian

building tradition.2 It is thought that Austronesian-speaking people lived in southern China
and North Vietnam in the middle of the 4th Millennium BC, from where they expanded to
Taiwan around 4000 BC and to the Philippines in 3000 BC from where they went to Borneo,
Sulawesi, and western Indonesia, reaching as far as Madagascar and in the opposite
direction, the South Pacific islands. The vast majority of Southeast Asian languages,
including those of Madagascar, Micronesia, Polynesia, parts of Vietnam and Taiwan, are
Austronesian-based attest to their common heritage.

The traditional Austronesian house is built of wood, rectangular in shape, elevated

on posts, entered by climbing a notched tree-trunk ladder. A hearth below an elevated

2
Tjahjono, Gunawan (ed.), Indonesian Heritage: Architecture, Archipelago Press, Singapore, 1999
storage rack for firewood is the focus of its interior. The archetype is the basis of the typical
house found in all rice-growing landscapes of Southeast Asia.

The Austronesian archetype gives a unity to regional architecture. However what

makes the unity interesting is how different people were able to achieve a range of
variations on the basic house type. The Philippine version is the lowland bahay kubo that is
considered to be the basis of local architecture.

Situated near or within groups of terraces, small hamlets are composed of groups of
single-family dwellings that architecturally reflect the Cordillera people’s interpretation of
their mountain environment. A steeply pitched, thatched pyramidal roof covers a wooden-
walled dwelling. Built of interlocking wood panels joined completely with pegs, the house is
raised on four posts off the ground. The single-room dwelling centers on an interior stone
hearth. Walls are of thick wood to insulate from the cold. Windows and the single access
door from the exterior are deliberately kept small. Once the ladder leading to the access
door is lifted from the ground at night, only the nuclear family remains inside the dwelling.

Architecture becomes art with the usual incising of tribal symbols for prosperity into
the wooden wall and small entrance door. Beneath the roof, the kingpost that holds the
trusswork together, a symbol of the structural center of the house is usually carved into
human figures resembling the bul-ol (rice god). The architecture also provides a sheltered
open space underneath the structure where the family’s daytime activities take place. The
granary, a smaller structure resembling the main dwelling, serves as a shrine for the family
reliquary.

There is incredible visual unity in the Cordillera village. The architectural form of the
pyramidal roofs covered with thick thatch echo the rice stalks of the surrounding landscape.
The steep roofs echo the mountain forms beyond. Clusters of dwellings form small hamlets
of interrelated families that lie within or near their terraces. A hamlet’s centrally located rice
field is its focus. Owned by the tribal chief, this is the first parcel to be planted or harvested.
He makes all agricultural decisions for the village, manages its primary ritual granary gods
(bul-ol), and keeps the basket reliquary where portions of consecrated sacrifices from all
agricultural rituals are deposited.
 A small distance away from the cluster of dwellings is the ritual hill, usually a small
rise marked by a grove of sacred betel trees around either a hut or open thatched shed
where the priests (mumbaki) live and perform rites and sacrifices.

Among the Asian paddy landscapes, one stands out: the Rice Terraces of the
Philippine Cordilleras. High in the remote areas of the Philippine Cordillera mountain
range, mountain slopes are terraced and planted to rice. The majestic landscape shows
the great length that the Filipino, or the Asian for that matter, will go to be able to plant rice.
Terraced areas in widely varying states of conservation are spread over most of the 20,000
sq km land area (7% of the total land mass of the Philippines) principally centered in the
provinces of Kalinga-Apayao, Abra, Benguet, and Ifugao. The improbable site is found at
altitudes varying from 700 to 1,500 meters above sea level. Terraces are sliced into the
contours of the mountains that rise to a slope reaching a maximum of 70° (compared to a
maximum slope of 40° in Bali).

In contrast to the growing conditions common to Asian lowland rice agriculture, the
rice terraces of the Cordilleras grow a special high-altitude strain of rice under extremely
demanding climatic and agricultural constraints that is found only in the rice terraces area.
This particular strain germinates under freezing conditions, grows chest-high stalks of non-
shattering panicles, unlike lowland rice that grows to knee height with easily-shattering
panicles. The rice is traditionally harvested by women while chanting the hud-hud, a chant
that was elevated by as one of the ‘Ten Most Valuable Intangible Heritage of the World’ in
2001. An example of the culture-nature connection, being able to stand erect while
harvesting and simultaneously chanting the hud-hud would not have been possible without
the waist-high highland variation in the rice strain different from the lowland rice variety that
requires bending to harvest the stalks. A second example of the connection is that of the
non-shattering panicles which makes it possible to bundle the rice and transport the
bundles manually on shoulder poles or on tops of heads for storage in granaries.

More culture-nature connections are evident. Terraces are commonly built in three
ways. Walls are constructed completely of stone. The second method is by building walls
of packed mud. The third variation mixes a foundation course of stone and packed mud
wall above. Terraces rise in groups from valleys, climbing up the slopes stopping just
below peaks continually covered with mist. Terraces normally face east, to assure a
maximum of sunlight.

A ring of private forests (muyong) caps each terrace group. The management of the
muyong are closely regimented through traditional tribal practices. The owners of the forest
parcels are fully conscious that he is participating in a collective effort. His forest is
essential in maintaining ecological balance and that any negative intervention brings
disadvantage not only to him but to the other terrace owners.

Water, the lifeline of the terraces, is equitably shared. No single terrace is allowed to
obstruct the flow of water from his downhill neighbor. A complex system of dams, sluices,
canals, and bamboo pipes transfers the water from the highest terrace to the lowest,
draining into a stream or river at the foot of the valley.

Of all Philippine monuments, the rice terraces are the best known throughout the
country. In fact, most Filipinos regard the terraces as their greatest national symbol, an
appropriate symbol because the site is not a single monument but a vast, living site that
combines both the natural and cultural. It is also a monument significant because it was
built voluntarily without any forced labor. What makes the symbol even more appropriate is
that the rice terraces combine architecture, engineering, and environmental management in
a system that is still sustainable to this day, a fitting tribute to the traditional thinkers who set
the management system centuries ago. The system has been orally handed down to allow
their people to continue living on the site and for them to continue to grow rice.

The terrace landscape illustrates the complexity of architecture in rice. It establishes

architecture as one of the many elements in the totally of agricultural, engineering,
agricultural, environmental, and cultural traditions that come together in the growing of rice.
It sets architecture in the context of a cultural and environmental system, precisely in the
way architecture was meant to be conceived.

UNESCO inscribed the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras in the UNESCO
World Heritage List for being “outstanding examples of living cultural landscapes. They (the
terraces) illustrate the traditional techniques and a remarkable harmony between
humankind and the natural environment.”3

The cultural landscape of rice is a phenomenon that combines both natural and
cultural concerns. It brings out that fact that the landscape of rice cannot be understood if
its parts are studied individually. The architecture of rice, therefore, should be viewed in the
context of the cultural landscape that it exists in.

Although traditional knowledge orally handed down from generation to generation

has guided the maintenance of the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras, its
contemporary maintenance history has always been tied into its status as a World Heritage
site.

The fragile site owes its preservation to the strong spiritual values of the Ifugao
culture that has been guiding all aspects of daily life for over a thousand years, as some
scholars maintain. Tradition has always been the source that determined all cultural and
physical actions in the site. Until this day, rituals invoke spirit to commemorate individual or
communal celebrations, to seek assistance for physical afflictions, to settle disputes among
villagers, and to mark planting and harvesting during the yearly agricultural cycle. The spirit
world of the tribal mountain culture is deeply rooted to the highland lifestyle and
environment, expressed in a wealth of artistic output and in the traditional environmental
management system that is remains in place today. The history of the terraces, therefore,
is intertwined with that of its people, their culture and beliefs, and in their traditional
environmental management and agricultural practices.

The site is one of the few living cultural landscapes that continue to exist in the
contemporary world. Its UNESCO inscription has given international recognition to the
site. On the national level, maintaining the traditional values, whether spiritual or physical,
are under severe threat due to the pressing demands of modernization, the urgent socio-
economic needs of the community, and the lack of support from national authorities who
are not aware that preservation of the physical and cultural aspects of the site must go
hand in hand. Most national authorities believe that is enough to grant assistance for the
3 th
UNESCO World Heritage Committee, Report of the 19 Session of the Committee, Berlin, 1955
physical restoration of the terraces and disregard the preservation of the cultural values that
reinforce the continuation of the traditional agricultural system. Airports, highways, and
tourism infrastructure are also priorities that will threaten the endangered site and its
community even more.

The balance between tradition and progress is the key issue that the Rice Terraces
of the Philippine Cordilleras, must answer in order to determine the path that it must take for
the future. The difficult issue is to manage the forward move of the residents into the 21st
century while finding a means of maintaining their culture, traditional knowledge, and their
landscape in a sustainable manner. How can the local culture move towards the future
without being mummified into the past?

Change is difficult to manage in the Philippine Cordilleras. The terraces follow the
contours of the highest peaks of the mountain range. The narrow rice fields are built in
clusters from stone and mud. Privately owned forests that play an important part in the
maintaining the water cycle encircle terrace clusters. A traditionally designed hydraulic
system with sluices and canals democratically delivers an unobstructed water supply
starting from the highest terrace descending to the lowest.

Working in the terraces is extremely difficult. Access severely limits the introduction
of farm animals or machinery into the terraces. Therefore all agricultural activities and wall
maintenance work must be done manually. Nature is unpredictable. The irrigation system,
a fine-tuned web of natural streams, catchments, ditches, sluices, and bamboo pipes that
deliver water equally and democratically to each terrace has suffered extensive earthquake
damage that has misaligned the distribution system. Portions of the traditional system
constructed of natural materials possessed a pliability that allowed the network to adjust to
minor earth movements or heavy rain have been lost. Natural materials are no longer
readily available and recent experiments in repairing the system with rigid concrete have
been a failure.

Visual characteristics of the landscape are disappearing. Clusters of villages with

steep, pyramidal roofs of thatch were the most striking landscape features. An existing
program assists owners of houses who have lost their thatched roofs to galvanized iron
sheets to replace them with thatch once again.

Technical problems are being carried out on site in the areas of agriculture, forestry,
and hydraulics. Joining traditional knowledge with technology, a Unesco-aided project for
GIS mapping of the site commenced in January 2001 to generate the nonexistent baseline
data needed for site management planning. The output of this project will fuse the
traditional boundary system and computer-generated mapping of the terrace sites.

The management history of the site has been closely linked with its World Heritage
status. In preparation for site nomination, a joint effort by the UNESCO National
Commission of the Philippines and the ICOMOS Philippine Committee and local citizens
resulted in the organization of the Ifugao Terraces Commission. Its first task was to
prepare a Master Plan for the terrace clusters in the municipalities of Kiangan, Banaue,
Hungduan, and Mayoyao. The Master Plan recognized the need to continue the existing
culture-based traditional practices to assure the maintenance of the site, focusing on
cultural revival as the raison d’être for the simultaneous educational, environmental,
agricultural, and reconstruction programs being implemented by the national and local
authorities. Other priorities were: (a) to set in place management units that correspond to
the core management zones for terraces protection rehabilitation as well as support zones
for area-based and tourism development; (b) resolve the ownership and other policy issues
impinging on the implementation of the plan; (c) set up the designs and mechanisms for
resource generation and livelihood activities in support of the terraces; and (d) design and
establish the monitoring and evaluation system for plan implementation.

Program components were: (a) natural hazard management, (b) agricultural

management, (c) watershed management, (d) water management and irrigation, (e)
transport development, (f) tourism development, (g) socio-cultural enhancement, (h)
livelihood development, (i) institutional development.

World Heritage requirements were included in the Master Plan, and the four terrace
clusters became the nucleus for the World Heritage nomination.
 The Ifugao Terraces Commission was an advisory and monitoring body envisioned
to carry through the Master Plan. Following components identified in the plan, other
government agencies were mandated to cooperate with the Commission and to fund and
carry out programs that fell within their sector. However, the reality was that the agencies
felt that this was an imposition on their priorities and budgets so no projects were
completed. The funds allocated to the Ifugao Terraces Commission were minimal. It is
with no wonder that few projects were completed.

The Ifugao Terraces Commission was abolished and replaced with the Banaue Rice
Terraces Task Force. Its link to the ideals of the Ifugao Terraces Commission was strongly
maintained by the staff who moved over to the new agency. The Task Force was granted
project implementation powers but its approved budget was at a low level that did not allow
the initiation or much less the implementation of any projects. It was not even able to carry
out its initial mandate of updating the Master Plan done by the Ifugao Terraces
Commission.

The Banaue Rice Terraces Task Force was abolished by Presidential Decree in
1999. During the course of its short existence, the performance of the Banaue Rice
Terraces Task Force was been plagued by its extremely low budget allocation and threats
of abolishment by national authorities who could not comprehend that its mandate to
“restore the rice terraces” was more complex than what was perceived as simply repairing
broken walls and installing a new irrigation system.

In 1999 the World Heritage Committee inscribed the Rice Terraces of the Philippine
Cordilleras in the World Heritage in Danger List.

With the lack of a management authority for the site, the Offfice of the Provincial
Governor took over management responsibilities. Its first step has been to review and
update the original Management Plan for the site.

Lack of awareness on a national level and a stakeholders’ misunderstanding of what

are the responsibilities of maintaining a heritage site are what prevent the proper
management of the Rice Terraces. Unless national authorities see the need to
simultaneously preserve the integrated network of culture, nature, agriculture, and
environment that are the elements to preserving the site, only little gains can be achieved
and the cultural landscape will deteriorate into disrepair.

END

Photos:
1-Banaue10aa - Rice seedlings germinate in a flooded mountaintop paddy
2-Banaue5 - Terrace access is too steep for farm animals or machinery so all planting and
maintenance work has always been manually done
3. Banaue9aa - To illustrate the lengths that some Asians will go to plant rice, paddied
terraces are sliced into the steep mountainsides of the Philippine Cordillera range.
4. Kubo03 - The steep roofs reflect the mountain landscape while houses follow the
traditional Southeast Asian architectural archetype of houses on stilts.
5. RT2 - Single-room thatched dwellings are built within the terraced areas.
6. RT1 - The visual unity of rice terraces, traditional dwellings, and mountains form a
cultural landscape with a strong identity.