Banaue Rice Terraces 

In Luzon Province of the Northern Philippines, through mountains and rice terraces, the road ends at a church, in a small town called Banaue. 4,000 feet above sea level in Banaue sits a small market village in Ifugao province. Located north of Manila in the Philippines, Ifugao province is famous for the handiwork of its people, who increased cultivable lands by carving gigantic rice terraces from the sides of mountains. For over 2,000 years, the people of Batad have built these terraces, one stone at a time. This growing, living stairway stretches far beyond what the eye can see. Taking an estimated 2,000 years to build, the still-productive rice terraces rise from the valley floor to heights of up to 3,000 feet, a feat of engineering so substantial that some call them the eighth wonder of the world. The only man made wonder which was literally sculpted from the earth. A scarcity of water has led to some rice patties drying up.The mountainous rice terraces of Banaue and vicinity in the Philippines are mankind’s grandest scaled engineering feat. The vertical distance between bottom and top rows exceeds the height of the world’s tallest building. If the terraces were laid end to end, they would stretch half way around the world.

 

The terraces cover 10,360 square kilometers (about 4000 square miles) of the mountainside. They are fed by an ancient irrigation system located from the rainforests above the mountains. Locals to this day still tend to the rice and vegetables on the terraces, although more and more younger Ifugaos do not find farming appealing, often opting for the more lucrative hospitality industry generated by the Rice Terraces. The result is the gradual erosion of the characteristic steps, which need constant reconstruction and care.With no electricity or road, the people of Batad live their lives as they have for thousands of years, with a deep, close connection to the earth. They worship ancestral spirits, sacrificing three chickens or one pig to appease an angry spirit. When a person dies, the body is hung from the thatched roof of their hut for three days as a sign to the villagers that the person has moved on to a better place. Afterwards, the bones of a deceased family member are collected and placed ceremoniously inside the roof of the family’s dwelling, to give comfort and protection to the living.

  

Preservation

The Banaue Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras was been named as a world heritage site[18][19][20] by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in 1995. It has passed by UNESCO’s standards[21] due to the blending of the physical, socio-cultural, economic, religious, and political environment as a living cultural landscape. It has passed 3 criteria’s of UNESCO:

  • Criterion (iii) - The terraces have been used as the community’s sustainable and primarily communal system of rice production.
  • Criterion (iv) - The rice terraces are a memorial to the history and labor of unrecorded generations which may span to several thousand generations.
  • Criterion (v) - The rice terraces are a good example of land-use as a result of the interaction between the community and the environment.

Terrace of paddy fields in Yuanyang County, Yunnan, China. 

 

The Banaue Rice Terraces have also been in-scripted to the List of World Heritage in Danger on 2001 as the dangers of deforestation and climate change threatens to destroy the terraces. Another contributing factor is globalization where the younger generations of the Ifugaos have recently had the opportunity to gain access to media and education, most of the younger Ifugaos[23] have opted to come to the capital for work instead of the traditional farming tradition. 

sources: wikipedia