The Manzanar Project — Fertiliser-Assisted Mangrove Planting for Livestock Fodder on Eritrea's Red Sea Coast

The coastal strip around Massawa, on Eritrea's Red Sea, receives under 20mm of rain a year and has almost no freshwater or arable soil. From the mid-1990s, cell biologist Gordon H. Sato — a former UCLA and Salk Institute researcher — worked with villagers at Hargigo (also called Arkiko) to test whether mangroves could be grown on bare tidal mudflats without freshwater irrigation.

Sato's technique buried each mangrove seedling with a small piece of iron and a perforated bag of nitrogen-and-phosphorus fertiliser, which leached nutrients slowly enough for roots to establish in seawater; applied at roughly three tonnes of fertiliser per hectare, the method proved reliably successful. By the mid-2000s, around 600,000 mangrove trees had been planted in the vicinity of Hargigo alone, and villagers began feeding the protein-rich leaves to sheep and goats, supplementing the meagre grazing available on the arid coast. In 2005 the Asahi Glass Foundation awarded Sato its Blue Planet Prize for the technique, and the Manzanar Project also received a Rolex Award for Enterprise.

Villagers reported concrete livelihood gains — one herder, Salih Mohamud, said his flock grew from three sheep to fifteen — and the mangroves' root systems additionally sheltered small fish communities. The evidence base rests mainly on journalistic and prize-citation accounts rather than peer-reviewed monitoring: no independently published data quantifies long-term mangrove survival rates, carbon storage or aggregate household income change, and Sato's death in 2017 leaves the programme's current operational status unclear.

Read the full analysis: https://iol.co.za/business-report/opinion/2008-05-24-mangroves-transform-bare-eritrean-mud-flats-into-a-rainforest-of-plenty/