The Manzanar Project — Fertilised Mangrove Afforestation on Eritrea's Red Sea Coast

Dr Gordon H. Sato, a US-based cell biologist who as a child had been interned at California's Manzanar camp during the Second World War, began the "Manzanar Project" in 1985 on the barren, saline tidal mudflats near Hargigo (also called Arkiko), a fishing village on the Red Sea coast a few kilometres south of Massawa, Eritrea. Early plantings of mangrove seedlings on the nutrient-poor flats had repeatedly failed to establish.
Sato's fix was a low-cost fertilisation method: small plastic bags of nitrogen, phosphorus and iron were buried at the base of each seedling, each bag pierced with a carefully sized hole so nutrients leached out gradually as the tide moved. The approach required no freshwater, arable soil or heavy machinery, only cheap fertiliser and manual labour.
Over more than a decade the plantings took hold at scale. A 2024 peer-reviewed account in the journal Ecological Restoration put the total at roughly 700,000 mangrove trees on the Eritrean coast; later press and encyclopaedia accounts describe the stand as having grown to nearly one million trees. Crabs, shrimp and juvenile fish returned to the new mangrove stands, supporting local fisheries, and families in Hargigo began feeding the leaves to sheep and goats; when milk yields from a leaves-only diet proved insufficient, villagers began grinding fish remains onto the leaves as a protein supplement, after which families reported improved milk production.
The project drew international recognition, including a profile from the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, and its fertilisation technique was later trialled to restore mangroves on Mauritania's Senegal River Delta coast, showing some transferability. No independent hectare-level survey or carbon-stock study of the Eritrean site was found in the sources reviewed, and the model rested heavily on Sato personally (he died in 2017); it is a community-scale, informally governed restoration rather than a certified or replicable scheme.

Read the full analysis: https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/gordon-sato-mangrove-poverty-manzanar/1562373.html