The Native Rice Dilemma, part 1

Rice bundles ready to be planted

The first thing to know about rice farming is that it’s not a profitable business. In fact, the farmers out here lose money every year when they grow rice—sometimes even with an additional income. I helped Adam create a sample balance sheet for farmers to show their profits and losses. The only losses we took into account were rice bought for eating, and the costs of farming and milling the rice (or pounding it, in the case of tinawon). Even with just those losses—not including rent, school, and living expenses—the farmers still lose several thousand pesos every year (5000P=100$). Unless they have a substantial alternative income, they’ll always be in the red.

This is what I’ll call the native rice dilemma—how can we make tinawon farming viable? In my eyes, it’s one of the only ways to maintain the terraces—to grow the rice that the farmers created the terraces for in the first place.

Let me back up. For centuries the Ifugao grew only one rice in the terraces—the tinawon. Sometime in the last 100 years, the Department of Agriculture (D.A.) introduced a new, higher yielding variety (H.Y.V.) that produced a harvest twice a year. The tinawon, by contrast, produces only one harvest. At first, it sounded great, all farmers needed to do was buy the rice from the D.A. and they could have twice the harvest. The rice needed less water to grow—also a huge benefit—and with the pesticides and fertilizers the D.A. provided, they could get rid of the challenges that came along with organic farming.

Many of the locals resisted at first. They were suspicious of this new variety and had reservations about using the pesticides. However, a lot of their questioning changed after the first few farmers grew their harvest and had twice the yield without all the pest problems that plagued the tinawon farmers. So, many of them—but not all—decided to grow the high yielding variety (H.Y.V.) after all.

A group of women clean mud off the rice seedlings and prepare them for planting

But it wasn’t as perfect as the D.A. had promised. After a few years, the H.Y.V. began to harden the soil, severely reducing its nutritive values. In addition, the chemical supplements from the D.A. killed off the native snails and the small fish that propagated in the rice field water. The new rice variety wasn’t working. In desperation, some of the farmers switched back to the tinawon, but since they’d dramatically altered the soil chemistry and the previous ecosystem that had nurtured it (the snails and fish), the tinawon failed the first year the farmers tried to grow it again. And so they were left desperate, with no harvest at all.

I’ve talked with several tinawon rice farmers, and they all agree that if they’d persisted with growing the tinawon, if they’d returned to creating the original soil conditions, then they likely would have been able to grow it again. But that takes time and patience, which many farmers don’t have when their life depends on their harvest.

So, the D.A. provided a solution—a new rice variety. But after a few years, they encountered the same problems: the hardening soil, the low harvests, etc. So every few years the D.A. had a new variety to introduce to the farmers—it was cheap, it worked for a few years, and then the D.A. would have a new, affordable variety for them to grow. It developed into a codependent relationship, questionable to say the least. Many farmers never grew tinawon again.

Who cares? Well, for one thing, the H.Y.V. requires pesticides and fertilizers which compromise the health of the grain and the rice field ecosystem. Secondly, the H.Y.V. isn’t native and doesn’t promote the native ecosystem and rice field health that the tinawon does; this compromises the integrity of the terraces. Thirdly, the H.Y.V. must be provided by the D.A.—which disempowers farmers who used to own their own rice seedlings without depending on anyone. Lastly, the tinawon is much more nutritious and sustaining—it’s actually considered one of the healthiest rice varieties in the world.

And there’s a foreign market for tinawon, which is huge—I’ll address that later. Some of the farm owners here are middle to upper classmen who split the harvest with tenants who live on the fields and work the land. But some are poor farmers struggling to make a living the only way they know how. 50 years ago, none of this was an issue. The locals didn’t have the cash needs they have now: there was no school, no cell phones; no houses with electricity. The Ifugao grew their own food, made their own clothes, constructed their homes with local materials, and their children learned farming, not English and math.

But with modernization, this has changed. Farmers now have cash needs they didn’t have before and the farming community they once depended on for labor has dissipated.

The big question I had before I came here was: how can farming become a viable option for the locals? The only way the terraces will maintain their structural integrity is if they’re maintained by farmers, and the only way they’ll be maintained is if farmers are growing the rice. The best chance the terraces have for long term terrace health is if farmers grow the native tinawon organically as they did before.

It’s simple, I thought: they should export the organic rice into the U.S.

Unfortunately, it turns out that’s not such an easy solution.