DepDev: Ifugao emerging as Cordillera ‘growth pole’
BAGUIO CITY—Ifugao, home of the World Heritage-inscribed rice terraces, has been designated as an emerging “growth pole” alongside Cordillera region’s rice granary Kalinga province, because of their improved economic performance, the Department of Economy, Planning and Development (DepDeV) said during a briefing on Tuesday.
The province has been in the spotlight recently because of a pitch made to Malacañang in August by urban planner and architect Felino Palafox Jr. to generate a comprehensive master plan for preserving the rice terraces. Often regarded as 2,000-year-old structures, recent archaeological findings place these still thriving terraced rice farms to be between 400 and 500 years.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) had also been collaborating with the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to jumpstart biodiversity conservation by harmonizing the economic plans for Ifugao ancestral domains with the concepts of wildlife preservation.
Baguio-centric growth
The Ifugao economy grew by 5.4 percent in 2025 and has reflected the fastest growth rate in the Cordillera next to Baguio City, said Jose Dado, DepDev chief economist for the Cordillera.
It was followed by Kalinga’s growth performance of 4.9 percent which puts them in a three-tiered growth scenario led by the “competitive urban core” of Baguio and Benguet province, which is a major supplier of salad vegetables to Metro Manila and parts of Luzon.
The provinces of Apayao, Abra and Mountain Province have been designated as “frontier economies.”
Dado reconfigured the strategic development thrusts of these mountain provinces given their huge economic disparity with Baguio, considered the regional capital.
Baguio grew by 5.6 percent last year, which reflected a slowdown from 5.9 percent in 2024. But the city represents nearly half of the Cordillera’s 4.4-percent growth in 2025, said Aldrin Federico Bahit Jr., chief statistician of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) in the region. The value of Baguio’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2025, or the cost of goods and services it produced last year, was P188.89 billion.
This 117-year-old mountain resort city serves as a highly urbanized travel and education hub for the Cordillera and the larger northern Luzon.
“The P478,956 per capita GDP of the city of Baguio was the highest among all the [local] economies in the region. This was higher than the per capita GDP of the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) which stood at P207,589,” Bahit said when he presented Baguio’s 2025 provincial product account at the briefing.
“The city was the sole economy in CAR that exceeded the regional per capita GDP. The province of Benguet ranked second in terms of per capita GDP in the region (with P181,866),” he added.
The per capita GDP estimates how much every resident contributed to economic growth, and reveals a “widening gap and disparity among Cordillera provinces,” Dado said.
Bahit agreed, saying policymakers will need to take note of the demographics on the ground no matter how good the economic performance has been.
For example, the 2024 community-based monitoring system of Ifugao revealed an employment rate of only 40.40 percent across its 11 municipalities to include the rice terraces host towns of Banaue, Mayoyao, Hungduan and Kiangan, said Eric Aplosen, PSA statistician for Ifugao, in an online briefing on Sept. 25. He said 74.22 percent of the province’s labor force are farmers.
The Ifugao planning office puts the labor force tally at 89,869 residents, of which 82,103 are employed, 7,766 are unemployed while 25,952 are underemployed. Because most terrace farms are family-owned, the data would not measure informal labor arrangements nor the work required by a rice culture that dictates how and what to plant on these ancient farms.
According to a working draft submitted by the UNDP, NCIP and the Ifugao government for funding, only 77.4 percent of rice and corn farmers have been earning an annual P20,000 or less from terrace paddies called “payao.”
Less than 5 percent of them earn more than P40,000 annually, to explain a disturbing trend of terrace farms being abandoned.
