1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [222]
Robert F. Maher of Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, became, in the 1960s, the first archaeologist to excavate the terraces. Surprisingly, his work was not followed up until the early 2000s. Radiocarbon dates in both studies showed that the heartland of the terraced area was, as Beyer had guessed, as much as two thousand years old. But the area outside the center—the great bulk of the terraces—was at most a few hundred years old, as Keesing had thought. When Legazpi seized Manila, many of its inhabitants moved into the hills to escape Spanish demands for labor—workers to build city walls and construct great ships for silk and porcelain. The radiocarbon dates suggested that the Ifugao were among the refugees. They had poured into an outlying area that was hilly enough to force them to build terraces to survive. An explosion of earth moving followed soon after, as did a flourish of ritual and custom. The terraces thus were largely the creation of the same great exchange that was now destroying them—they were, in their way, a monument to the galleon trade, created by globalization like the worms that were wrecking them.
Looking around Ifugao, I was struck by the number of abandoned, crumbling terraces. People were walking away from their farms. It was easy to understand—Ifugao is among the poorer regions in the Philippines. More than 90 percent of its income comes from government programs. The terraces are beautiful but small; the cool climate limits the rice harvest. A typical family’s holdings, one U.N. report estimates, can feed it for just five months. In this capital of rice the crop most people actually depend on for meals is the sweet potato. Others buy rice at subsidized prices from the government’s National Food Authority—a photograph of Ifugao farmers lining up for rice handouts in front of their terraces stirred a brief outcry in 2008. (The Manila government is Asia’s biggest rice importer.) Below, meanwhile, is the city, great Manila athrob with lights and sound, promising jobs, education, and excitement to hungry young men in knee-deep water. So many people have left the terrace lands that the communities Manuel wanted to preserve now exist mainly to provide a fine backdrop for photographs.
More subsidies, that’s what the terrace farmers need to continue! So argue pro-farmer activists and the national Department of Environment and Natural Resources. While waiting for the money to flow in, the mayor of Banaue, the most important town in the terrace zone, hired unemployed people to grow rice. To maximize returns, they planted new, hybrid varieties of rice, which grow faster than traditional varieties. All the while, the worm problem worsened. The deforestation that had let in the worms also reduced the slopes’ water-retention capacity. Rising numbers of hotels and restaurants for tourists competed with farms for the remaining paddy water. The paddy soil got drier. In drier soil, worms reproduce more rapidly.
A ray of light came from Eighth Wonder, a rice-importing company founded in Ulm, Montana, by Mary Hensley, a social worker and travel agent who had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Ifugao. With a partner in Manila—Vicky Garcia of Revitalize Indigenous Cordilleran Entrepreneurs (RICE), a nonprofit organization—Hensley in 2005 launched a plan to export “heirloom” rice to the United States and Europe. It was a struggle. To get enough rice to sell abroad, the partnership had to persuade the farmers to form cooperatives (not a local tradition), teach them to dry their rice uniformly to ensure quality, build special milling equipment that could process the thick hulls of the area’s ancient landraces, and push regional utilities to provide electricity to run the equipment. Landslides blocked roads, typhoons battered ships, equipment broke down, and spare parts could not be found. There was little precedent at a legal level: Eighth Wonder, according to Manila newspapers, was the only rice exporter in all of the Philippines. Sales in the United States launched in 2009. Seven varieties