Pests, migration threaten 2,000-year-old Philippines rice terraces

0 Comments | AFP, December, 2007

BATAD, Philippines (AFP) — After putting his seedlings to bed in the world-famous Banaue rice terraces in the northern Philippines, farmer Gabriel Balicdon works as a tourist guide and buys rice from the grocer.

Built by Ifugaos -- illiterate mountain farmers and woodcarvers -- at about the same time the Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China were being constructed, the terraces look like giant staircases leading to the clouds.

But now migration, the lure of easy tourist money and a plague of giant earthworms imperil the 2,000-year-old structures that follow the contours of the Cordileras mountains.

The flooded terraced paddies that draw nearly 100,000 tourists a year have since 2001 been on the "endangered list" of the UN's World Heritage sites....