An atlas of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems
All over the world, people farm in clever old ways that still work. Here are 84 of them.
Each page is drawn in the design language of the place that farms it — its cloth, its tiles, its prints — and each one hides the agronomy, hydrology and history a step deeper, for anyone who wants it.
Walk the fieldsOpen fields
Each of these pages is finished and drawn in the craft of its place. They run west to east, the same order as the “next field” links at the foot of every page.
The patchwork
Coloured parcels are open to visit. Hatched ones are fallow: resting, with their page still to come — tap one to read what grows there.
Where they are
China, Japan and Korea hold 42 of the 84 systems, so East Asia gets its own close-up. The map shows land only, with no borders drawn.
Markers show the approximate centre of each designated area. Hover or tab to a marker to read its name. Solid markers are open pages.
Designation starts with a proposal from a national government. China, Japan and Korea each run a national agricultural-heritage list of their own, which gives them a pipeline of well-documented candidates ready for FAO's Scientific Advisory Group.
That says more about administrative capacity than about where traditional farming survives. Large parts of Africa, Central Asia and the Pacific are under-represented relative to the diversity of their farming systems. The list here is the one supplied for this atlas (designations to 2023); FAO has continued to designate new sites since.
When they were named
Each block is one system, stacked by the year FAO designated it.
What is GIAHS?
Some farms have been looked after so cleverly, for so long, that the whole world agreed to help keep them alive — not frozen like a museum, but still growing food.
A national government submits a proposal to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The proposal must describe the system against the five criteria and include an action plan for keeping it going. FAO's Scientific Advisory Group reviews it, often visits the site, and recommends designation or asks for changes.
The programme began in 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. The first sites were designated in 2005 — among them the rice–fish culture of Qingtian in China, which is on this list.
UNESCO World Heritage protects places of outstanding universal value, and asks that their key features be preserved. GIAHS designates systems — the farming, the knowledge and the institutions — and expects them to change. FAO calls this dynamic conservation: supporting a system to adapt (new markets, tourism, better varieties) without losing what makes it work.
Several sites hold both labels. The Hani terraces are a World Heritage cultural landscape (2013); the Tribunal de les Aigües that governs l'Horta de València is on UNESCO's intangible list (2009); Jeju's haenyeo culture is on it too (2016).
Designation carries no binding legal protection and no direct funding from FAO. Its effects come through national policy (many countries fund designated sites), through branding and tourism, and through the monitoring the action plan commits to.
Researchers have documented both sides: price premiums, renewed pride and youth interest in some sites; tourism pressure, commodification and uneven benefit-sharing in others. Where those tensions are known for a system, its page says so under Under pressure.
On method
Every page borrows its look from a craft of the place it describes: a kantha running stitch for the floating fields of Bangladesh, a kasavu gold border for Kuttanad, a Florentine Codex leaf for the chinampas. Each illustration is drawn in code for this atlas and labelled in the manner of. None is a reproduction.
Rituals are described, not illustrated. Religious symbols, ritual objects, clan marks and specific community textile designs are not used as ornament anywhere. People are drawn at work, never as costume.
The first thing on every page is a picture and a sentence a six-year-old can follow. Underneath, Dig deeper panels (●○○ to ●●●) and clickable notes carry the agronomy, water engineering, species names and governance for readers who farm, study or manage these places.
Facts come from FAO's GIAHS documentation, national programmes, UNESCO files and peer-reviewed work, listed at the foot of each page. Where sources disagree — ages of terraces are the usual suspects — the figure is marked with a small question mark and the disagreement is explained. Corrections, especially from people who live and farm in these places, are welcome.