Banaue, The Haven Of Rice Terraces

The 2,000 to 6,000 years old Terraces has been an agricultural and cultural icon of the Ifugao. The Indigenous small scale Ifugao Filipino farmers has amazingly carved this beautiful mountain landscape with least materials and equipments.
This picturesque exhibits the fragile collective steadiness of humankind to its environment. The Ifugao Rice Terraces are the most precious involvement of Philippine ancestors to human race. For two millenia that has been passed on from one generation to the next, the Ifugao Rice Terraces mirrors a continuing image of an ancient progress that definitely outshines diverse challenges and impediments masqueraded by modernization.
Consider the superiority of engineering with the advancement to complex irrigation systems, highly structured farming system and the incredible cautions for shaping the natural curve of hills and mountains into terraced pond fields. Getting in touch with an elevated altitude just to yield water from the forests and mountain tops. This work of wonders has also been a dramatic demonstration for a communal success and mirrors the power of collective movement for the benefit of everyone in the community, basically a cooperative approach.
Organic Ifugao farming includes offering their farming activities and the fruits of their labor to the Supreme Energy, God. The Hudhud is consists of narrative chants performed mainly by elder Ifugao women normally for the rice sowing season, at harvest time and at funeral wakes and rituals.

On the other side of the story, the awesome terraced landscape of grand splendor is now defenseless to social and economic changes. Many Ifugao youth of this new generation see farming as no more appealing. This has caused the erosions for some of the terraces. Yes, the tourism is good but Filipinos must be reminded that the Banaue Rice Terraces is not just all about the facade of fashion but rather a functional interaction between the human to environment.
May the erosions that has been happening to the once very stunning Banaue Rice Terraces alarms us all Filipinos that the occurrence of degradation to another extraordinary heritage only mirrors our own recklessness and ignorance of not having some empowerment to sense of history. The erosions of terraces are erosions of our harmonious relationship to nature and our failure to our duty of good stewardship to our environment. This may serve a wake up call for all of us.
The Banaue Rice Terraces is still an awesome place to visit with the richness of culture to discover but the inspiring ancestors and their extraordinary lives may move us to the preservation of its total beauty.