Cordillera Rice Terraces – The Need To Rethink This PH National Treasure
Pinoys, when you complain against climate change, you complain against what your own people, perhaps including you, may have done to Mother Earth, for decades – abuse natural resources.
The rice terraces are beautiful to tourists, Filipinos and foreigners alike – but they are not so beautiful when you consider the rice planted and the yield. Look at the above image again – yellow swaths against greens – ricefields with soils poor in nutrients for any crop.
Truth to tell, the owners of those terraces are not earning enough, and so they leave the area, or stay and complain about life.
It is as if the terrace farmers have no choice. But there is! They just have notbeen thinking the science of it. This is a wide-reading agriculturist speaking.
Mar Berry of World Agroforestry has written about it: “Coping With Climate Change Through Agroforestry: The Experience Of The Ykalingas In The Philippines[1].” I hate to say it against a fellow communicator, but Mr Berry’s article is 3 times not accurate. Thus:
1. Steep slopes & rocky soils.
He says, “The Ykalinga people practice bench terracing to maximize the use of their land, which is usually composed of steep slopes and rocky soil.” No Sir: Bench terracing is not maximizing use of land – growing a food forest would be. No Sir: The land now occupied by the terraces originally was not rocky at all; it was rich in organic matter, but terracing removed all that natural goodness.
2. Ykalingas learning about agroforestry.
Mr Berry says, “To adapt, Ykalinga farmers in Kalinga, Cordillera Administrative Region, Philippines are learning about agroforestry.” On the contrary, Mr Berry, ages before ours, the Ykalingas were already “practicing” agroforestry by allowing Mother Nature to grow the forests with all those foods – plants and animals – for humans. What needs to be done now is to rethink those rice terraces.
In fact, the Ykalingas unlearned the growing of (that is, allowing to grow) the natural food forest – now they have to relearn it.
3. Bench terracing as maximizing the use of the land.
What I can see is that the Ykalingas are neglecting agroforestry and insisting on the rice terraces as we can see. To simplify, agroforestry is forest + farm – the rice terraces are 100% farm and zero forest. I hope the people of the Department of Agriculture in the Cordilleras are teaching them to practice agroforestry again, but right now what is seen is agro (rice terraces) and what is unseen is forest (trees amid rice).
Mr Berry describes “the biophysical limitations in the area” as having “steep slopes, rockiness and shallow soils prone to erosion.” He is correct about the slopes and rockiness, but not the shallow soils
Originally, those were not shallow soils, but because the natives did not return the organic matter lost when they cleared the trees for rice, they slowly impoverished the soil, as well as themselves!@517
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