1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (65 page)

Or was it? The first two anthropologists to study the Ifugao terraces arrived there before the First World War. Both were amazed at their apparent age. “It took a really long time to build those terraces,” marveled Henry Otley Beyer, the better-known member of the pair. A chemist who moved to the islands, married the teenage daughter of an Ifugao leader, and became known as the father of Philippines archaeology, Beyer firmly stated that Ifugao’s people “took between two and three thousand years to cover northern Luzon with the great terraced areas that exist there now.… [I]t was a thousand or 1,500 years ago when the terraced areas were at their maximum.”

Beyer’s estimate has long been accepted as gospel, repeated countless times in guidebooks like the one then in my bag. Unfortunately, he had no concrete evidence for this conclusion. He simply made a seat-of-the-pants guess about the time people without modern tools would need to build four hundred square miles of terraces. Not until 1962 did Felix Keesing, a Stanford anthropologist, try a different approach: he pored through Spanish records for mentions of the terraces. Although colonial “military commanders, mission fathers, and other visitors” crisscrossed Ifugao, not one mentioned the terraces until 1801. Because Keesing couldn’t believe that visitors wouldn’t marvel at this huge engineering feat, he reasoned that the terraces were a “comparatively recent innovation”—they were not a millennia-old tradition.

Neither Beyer nor Keesing had any archaeological evidence—they hadn’t so much as taken a shovel to the terraces. To be sure, terraces are difficult to date. Farmers constantly move around the soil, destroying the archaeological record. And modern archaeological tools like radiocarbon dating weren’t widely available until the 1960s.

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 were available, selling for $5.75 and $6.00 a pound. When I bought a pound, shipping cost $11.75. Ifugao rice was almost sixteen times more expensive than the rice in my supermarket.

Reactions to Eighth Wonder have been mixed, as I discovered when I mentioned the company to scientists in Manila. As growing numbers of Ifugao farmers flock to join the project, a rising percentage of the area’s harvest—a precious cultural artifact—is being sent out of the country to affluent foreign food snobs. Worse, the cooperatives, standardization, and mechanized processing are dramatically changing Ifugao culture—all for the benefit (as one scientist put it) of faraway people who want to pat themselves on the back for their enlightenment as they click the link to order fancy multicolored rice. The global market is not the solution, activists say, but the problem! These supposed do-gooders are just hooking Ifugao into the worldwide network of exchange, making them dependent as never before on the whims of faraway yuppies! Antipoverty activists charge the anti-trade activists with wanting to condemn the poor to backbreaking labor so that they can feel good about themselves as they sit in their air-conditioned offices in Manila. The terraces have been linked to the global network almost from the beginning—why should they experience only the harms (falling commodity prices, environmental damage) and not the benefits (communicating with people who are willing to pay sixteen times as much for rice)?

What’s being lost here? What would count as saving it?

ON THE BOAT

During another trip to Manila, I decided to see the place where Legazpi had first encountered Chinese junks: the beginning of today’s world-encompassing trade network. The encounter, I knew, occurred on the southern part of the island of Mindoro. But exactly where on Mindoro was unclear—the Spanish description of the meeting was confusing, at least to me. I thought a visit might dispel my confusion. Besides, I was curious.

A friend of a friend contacted one of her friends, who ran a hotel on the east coast of Mindoro. The message was conveyed to me: don’t drive to southern Mindoro. Guerrillas were active there. I was surprised—Mindoro, the closest big island to Manila, has a lot of pricey resorts on its north side. An Internet search showed that Mindoro’s hills indeed housed an old-style Communist insurgency, the New People’s Army. They are often photographed in green shirts with arm badges: a red triangle with an AK-47. Sometimes they wear berets. Sometimes they wave red flags with the hammer and sickle. Legazpi’s meeting had occurred, I knew, somewhere around the small town of Bulalacao. A year before my trip, the New People’s Army had visited there, blowing up a bulldozer, a dump truck, and some construction equipment.

I saw no indication that the guerrillas cared about individual American visitors. Still, taking a boat seemed prudent. Besides, I like boats.

The hotel owner found a vessel that I could charter inexpensively. I took a bus through Manila’s appalling traffic to the Mindoro ferry, climbed into a tiny, cheerfully crowded jitney van after landing, and bounced to the hotel, in the village of Bongabong. At five thirty the next morning I was wading to the boat: a modern version of the traditional shallow-draft
proa,
with two sweeping wooden outriggers. The
Traveller-7
had a tiny cabin, barely big enough to contain the engine batteries, a few liters of water, and a lighted coal brazier with a bubbling pot of rice. Flapping above the deck was a blue plastic tarp. With the Philippines’ tenacious refusal to fulfill touristic fantasies of exoticism, the three-man crew was wearing baseball caps and droopy basketball shorts with NBA logos.

After four hours along the cliff-bristling coast, we anchored off Bulalacao’s long concrete esplanade. The town had electricity and (intermittent) cell-phone service but was physically cut off—the road to the rest of the island was not only guerrilla-infested but unpaved and often impassable for anything but four-wheel-drive vehicles. I saw only a single car. A breeze riffled the surface of the water and the plastic tarps above the market kiosks. At the fringes of the market people were holding a cock fight. Signs of large-scale economic activity were not readily apparent.

I had no appointment or anyone to see. It was my notion that I would attract attention, and the attention would take me to the right person. After I had walked around for about fifteen minutes, a man showed up on a motor scooter. He took me up a long slope to the South Drive Bar and Grill, Bulalacao’s sole restaurant. The floor was gravel. In one corner was a small, dusty stage with three guitars, an electronic drum kit, several ramshackle speakers, and a laptop playing, unbelievably, “What a Wonderful World”—the original Louis Armstrong version. As the shuffle function switched the music to Japanese pop I was greeted by Chiquita “Ching” Cabagay-Jano, proprietor of the South Drive Bar and Grill and Bulalacao’s municipal planning and development coordinator and tourism administrator.

The
Traveller-7
(
Photo credit 10.2
)

In the manner of town planners everywhere, Cabagay-Jano was enthusiastic about Bulalacao’s prospects. Investors were coming in from the resorts to the north, she said. Investors were coming from China. Investors were coming from
America.
Land in Bulalacao was there to be acquired—one man had snapped up 250 acres for a golf course. The government was paving the road around southern Mindoro, which would allow regular bus service. Last year the town had held the First Bulalacao Windsurfing Invitational Cup—banners from the competition adorned the restaurant walls. A crew was coming the very next day to install a permanent webcam above the town beach. Bulalacao was poor now, but soon it would swim in the stream of global commerce. It was waiting for the world.

When I asked about Legazpi, Cabagay-Jano summoned a son, Rudmar, and instructed him to guide my boat to the place where Spain had encountered China. The site was in a shallow bay, a nick in the coast just to the south, occupied by the hamlet of Maujao. Just past the high-tide line was a spring covered by a concrete pillbox. A metal pipe dribbled water into a cement channel, which channeled it to the beach. Two kids were filling up plastic buckets with water.

For centuries Mangyan people had waited there in their embroidered bark-cloth shirts and indigo-dyed cotton loincloths for the junks from Fujian and Guangzhou. White parasols made from Chinese silk shielded them from the sun. The smoke from their beach fires must have been like a welcome signal to the ships from afar. Both the Mangyan and the Chinese had a written language. It is tempting to imagine scribes keeping track of the exchange, so many cakes of wax and bundles of cotton for so many porcelain plates, shiny bronze gongs, iron pots, and needles. The southern wing of the little bay was a sharp point like a finger into the sea. At dawn four and a half centuries ago the Spaniards had abruptly rounded that point in their strangely shaped vessels. Stand back, the Chinese had cried. Many did not live to see the sunset.

Occupying the point was a small, half-complete resort: Thelma’s Paradise. Workers were building the main guest house on the shore. Thelma’s Paradise was going to be a “farm resort.” Visitors from Manila would stay there and “participate in the Bulalacao farming lifestyle”—the phrase comes from a handout Rudmar gave to me. I asked one of the workers what this meant. Rudmar translated, perhaps imperfectly, the response. Busy city executives would come to Maujao and weed Thelma’s gardens—a refuge from e-mail, deadlines, and the office desk.