SITMo: Guarding the Ifugao Rice Terraces

Founded in 1999, SITMo is a federation of Ifugao Indigenous community members working to stop the abandonment of the hand-built stone rice terraces of the northern Philippine Cordillera, a landscape shaped over two millennia. It runs heritage education and youth exchange programs that reconnect young Ifugao with terrace farming, documents traditional ecological knowledge with academic partners including the University of the Philippines and Ifugao State University, and supports alternative highland livelihoods such as native tinawon rice cultivation and pallunan wild-honey harvesting to keep families farming the terraces rather than migrating out. In Banaue municipality alone, roughly a third of the area's 1,607 hectares of terraces had fallen out of cultivation as of 2018, the crisis SITMo was built to reverse.