Three hundred kinds of rice, gathered before the names could be lost

Across the uplands of Palawan, farmers from the Palaw'an, Tagbanua and Batak communities handed over seed their families had planted for generations. The 300 varieties they gave up were sent north to the country's rice institute, where researchers confirmed more than 180 as distinct. The rest were the same grain wearing different names in different valleys.

The collecting is the work of the Department of Agriculture's Kabuhayan at Kaunlaran ng Kababayang Katutubo programme, known as 4K, which has been visiting ancestral domains across the province since 2025. Eleanor Lotivo, officer-in-charge of the Agriculture Program Coordinating Office, said the samples went to the Philippine Rice Research Institute in Muñoz, Nueva Ecija, where the counting began.

Counting turned out to be the hard part. A landrace inventory always runs into the same difficulty: the same seed travels between neighbouring villages and picks up a new name in each one, usually descriptive — the colour of the grain, its scent, how long it takes to mature, or the person who first brought it in. Only morphological and genetic checks can tell a genuinely separate variety from a synonym. Of the 300, PhilRice confirmed more than 180 as original.

The farmers describe these types plainly: old, resilient, able to resist pests without help, grown long before hybrid seed reached the islands. That resilience is not an accident of breeding but of place. Rainfed upland rice has to survive what the season gives it.

What the seed carries is not only agronomy. For the Tagbanwa, who are among the few Philippine peoples still holding a pre-colonial script, the harvest feeds the pagdiwata ritual and the rice wine, tabad, fermented from it. Take away the grain and the ceremony has nothing to stand on.

The 4K programme also delivers production and post-harvest machinery to farmers and fishers inside ancestral domains — the unglamorous half of the work. But the seed is the part that cannot be replaced once it goes. At PhilRice it is dried, held in cold storage, and grown out from time to time so it does not lose the will to germinate. Sixty kilometres south of Manila, at Los Baños, the International Rice Research Institute holds more than 127,000 accessions, close to two in five of them farmer landraces rather than bred lines; duplicates of that collection sit inside a mountain on Spitsbergen.

Palawan's 180 will not end up in a vault near the North Pole. They are meant to go back into the ground, in the plots they came from, next planting season.