by Richard D North

Overlooked by the steep paths of the Cordillera mountains in the Ifugao province in the north of the Philippines, there is a huge but domesticated landscape. This is a place where men and women have built a farming system which dwarfs the pyramids, matches the Great Wall of China, and yet, in its detail, is as intimate as a Japanese garden. Almost every hillside has layer upon layer of ballroom-smooth paddies, fed by waterfalls as neat as something a garden centre might market.

"They are supposed to be the eighth Wonder of the World," says Simon Taylor, an Englishman who is small and tough, and thus ideal to appeal to these people as he - very modestly - suggests an improvement or two to their immemorial way of life. He has been working as a hydrological engineer for the UK-based VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas). "They say that there are 25,000 kilometres of rice terrace in the Philippines altogether", he adds.

Human works on the scale of this engineered terrain tend to be military or triumphal: but this is a workmanlike scene. Its essence is that rainwater falling high in the mountains must be made to flow gently through steps bearing rice plants. But the Igorot people who knew their gradients and their contours with such intimacy, and who reworked them with such muscularity and ingenuity, did not know about the plough or the wheel. They had been at their restructuring work since perhaps the time of Christ, but until Simon Taylor came, there was no water pump in these valleys. Now, dotted about, there are some villages with micro-hydro plants which recharge batteries to power bulbs in each stilted hut, and a water-driven mill for rice and flour is nearing completion.

Carmencita Cawed, a local woman who became a sociologist, noted that it was only half way through the last century that the Spanish finally tried seriously to control these mountains. Up till then, at least some of the few missionaries who laboured into the roadless tracts had been scalped for their pains. This is south-east Asia, and people are proud that their grandfathers or great grandfathers were head-hunters. Writing in the 1970s, Miss Cawed makes the tribal feuding which led to head hunting seem very present.

Now, one feels more likely to be the beneficiary of burgeoning enterprise. On one mountain path, we came across a small shelter over a plastic bucket of water in which were various soft drinks at a few pesos over the shop price. There was an honesty box and a bottle opener on a string. Granted that men with legs as bent as they are wiry had lugged these drinks, the money was willingly paid.

Walking is sweaty work even at dawn and at this altitude - upwards of 4,000 feet - where the rain and mist and sunshine chase each other through the jungle. In some places, steps have been cut into the soil by the hundred to make passage possible. Puffing up one of them, we were quickly and silently passed by a man carrying 50 kilos of rice and wearing flip-flops.

Tourists are not here in hordes yet and the richest of them, though made very welcome, must put up with some discomfort still. But Jeepneys - the hybrid locally-made vehicle which comprises jeep, taxi, and bus - haul in increasing numbers of sight-seers. The month before our arrival, a Jeepney had tipped its load (of locals) down the hillside when it put a wheel over the edge. One dead, many injured.

Will the visitors do more harm than good? Already, and partly because of foreign and citified local visitors, there is the weird mixture of the primitive and the vulgar which marks the backward regions of the modern world. So there are old men by the path in tribal costume demanding cash for pictures, and kids who want a biro or some money and are wearing name-brand running gear.

The man in tribal dress is usually a bit of a fraud: such clothing is a mark of distinction but it has been debased by people wearing it as a come-on for tourists. The genuine elders have rather given it up. The sweet kids who beg represent more of a problem. Jun (for "Junior") Addug, a local who went away to study nursing, but has returned to help look after his parents' rice fields and help in their small hotel, says it was the first generation of tourists who did the damage. He fears the dignity of his people is at stake. "The tourists wanted to be kind and came with bags of candy and pens and even paid money when they wanted to take pictures". Now, oddly, the begging risks becoming more insistent as visitors show they resent it.

There are high hopes in the Philippines government that tourism can bring wealth to the country's quainter places, and that means that cash is earmarked for airports and better roads in this previously unimportant region. It is far less clear that anyone has really grasped the difficulty that the rice terraces are not in good heart, and that there may soon be too few people to grow the rice which keeps them going. This matters to outsiders and locals alike. A decent slogan would be: No terraces, no tourists.

Jun's mother, Mirza, was standing as barangay captain (village mayor) when we visited. As a hotel-keeper and politically alert woman, she is the sort of person who has to work out the long term solutions. Looking out over the terraces from her restaurant, she points to an even bigger problem than young beggers. "In the mountains above the rice fields, people have been cutting down the trees for wood for carving and to grow crops", she says. It's been going on for as long as anyone can remember, and the effect is that water rushes down the hillsides too quickly when it rains, and there's none at all in the dry spells. "There are cracks in the fields and water gets down into them and bursts the terraces", she continues.*

par 11 up This problem is compounded by giant earthworms, accidently introduced along with newer, high-yielding rice: they create water channels within the terraces. A recent Guardian article noted that Philippino researchers believed the only safe way of combatting the problems depended on vines from the rainforests of the area.

These are now scarce. People have been denuding the hillsides above the terraces because it's easier than walking to hillsides further away where there are no terraces to damage. Village customs are not as strong as they were, no-one can shame or bully the miscreants into better behaviour.

At best, this is poor and subsistence farming involving hard and dreary work. What is a scene offering the utterest spiritual sustenenace to those who visit it, represents merely tedium to many of those who are needed to sustain it. The brightest and most vigorous of the young go to the lowlands, for temporary work or for good. Repairing the terraces, which used to be the work of the whole village, now falls to individual, and often elderly, farmers.

The news isn't all bad. Above Badat, one of the loveliest villages, there is bare hill, and many collapsed terraces. But in places there is newly replaced stone-work as well. Mrs Addug says that the Ifugao Rice Terraces Commission paid for it. Others remark that the commission is more keen on building roads than in this sort of work. But at least the outside world is taking an interest. Brian Durrans, a curator at the British Museum of Mankind, where there is a temporary exhibit on Ifugao traditions, says: "UNESCO has made the terraces a World Heritage site. They had to invent a new category, 'living cultural landscape'. These things are not a natural landscape, but a sort of social construction. Then there is another dimension. You can't just go to them and take them in all at once. They are truly observable only from a satellite".

That, and by spending at least a certain amount of time wandering amongst them. The rushed visitor needs to assume something of the pace of this place to tap into its pleasures, but also to feel something of the exigencies of the people who live here. It's the old story of leaving nothing but footprints and taking nothing but photographs. But motorised transport will increasingly offer tourists the illusion of seeing everything. Batad, for instance, is a couple of hour's walk from the nearest road. The foreigners and Philippinos who arrive to eat pizza in its cafe, or stir-fry up the hill at Mrs Addug's, must walk there or miss it.

Mrs Addug is looking forward to the arrival of a new road. It won't come quite all the way, and the aspirant mayor seemed uncertain about her feelings. She said: "A road halfway is good in some ways. But in terms of carrying things we want the road all the way in."

She fears that a road would make it easier for petty crooks to come and go, though it would also make her supplies cheaper and the profits to local farmers rather bigger. But then she's worried about the men who carry things over the hills for a living. Of course, one obvious effect would be that more - perhaps richer and lazier - tourists could arrive. This worries some of the foreign aid workers in the region: roads are bad enough in the purists' eyes, the facilities needed to bed and board rich tourists would be even worse.

But tourism is about the only option for these people. A second proposition might run: No tourism, no terraces. Somehow, the tourism dollar needs to be pumped into the local scene, both human and semi-natural. This might involve the bizarre twist of selling locally-grown mountain rice to the tourists at huge profit whilst the farmers live on much cheaper rice from the lowlands. The idea isn't as mad as it sounds: "We grow new strains of rice now", said Virgie Hangdaan, one evening in her hut at Banga-an, an hour's run by Jeepney from Banaue. "It's not as tasty, but it is three times as productive". Even so, for much of the year mountain rice-growers are dependent on imports from the lowlands anyway.

One night, we stayed with Virgie and her husband in a hut usually occupied by some of her nine children. Virgie is nearly 50, has a three year old (her own) in her arms, spends her days working out in the paddy, and was content to watch her husband kill and cook the chicken we had for supper. She was educated in the days when lowlanders taught English in the village school. Now, she says, the teachers are local Ifuagos and they teach in the local dialect, and the kids can't speak to foreigners so easily. Anyway, Virgie talked fluently and movingly and was curious about our lives.

Middle-aged villagers told us they were mostly Catholic, but practised spirit religion for the sake of their parents. One or two of them told of the anger of their parents when foreigners seemed too friendly. There were hints of severe drinking problems amongst the locals. The young were said to be mad keen on videos and the radio. Signs like this reinforce the feeling that contact with the outside world will make the old ways - including peasant farming of the terraces - less and less attractive. Increased tourism will bring new money, at least for some. It will bring useful contact with the outside world, and perhaps help young people stay at home. But so too it may help destroy the old culture.

Geoff Nettleton, of Cordillera Links, a UK-based education group, sees a real possibility of things going well. "They're actually on a winner because they've got land and so many people in the Philippines haven't". The local land rights are much disputed with the government, but the sense of possession, says Geoff, makes a good deal of out-migration very temporary. And he believes, too: "There's a big religious commitment to the rice in the field. People say it's tailing off, but it's a long tail. There are some signs of a resurgence of interest in rice-growing. These are New Wave Igorots, if you like."

Perhaps he's right. It would certainly be odd if the rice terraces were finally to fall into decay just as the entire world woke up to their extreme loveliness. Or is this just the sharpest tourism dilemma of all? Travel is the homage paid by affluence to poverty, and here poverty is not merely picturesque, as usual, but has made an entire landscape. The challenge will be to preserve the landscape in working order as the people catch the disease - we all have it - of disliking the idea of doing monotonous and lonely physical work for low wages.