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05 Oct 2003 01:04:01 GMT
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By Jonah Fisher
Asmara, Oct 5
(Reuters) - With a ring glistening in her nose and flip-flops submerged in
lukewarm seawater, a woman in traditional dress bends over a small mangrove
bush and pulls a clump of algae off its leaves.
Working in 45
degrees Centigrade (113 degrees Fahrenheit) heat she's tending the trees of
a controversial plantation on Eritrea's Red Sea coast.
To its supporters
the so-called Manzanar Project could one day eradicate famine and global warming.
But critics say the venture, brainchild of retired American cell biologist
Gordon Sato, is playing games with the environment.
Four years after
he first started planting there are over 250,000 mangrove trees where once
there was just sand.
One of the world's
poorest countries and independent for just 12 years, Eritrea is determined
to find new solutions to the scourge of famine. With little fertile land or
natural resources its 3.3 million people live under almost constant threat
of drought and food shortages.
Two things it
does have plenty of though, are desert and saltwater, spread out along a coastline
of some 1,200 km (750 miles).
DROUGHT
Finding a way
to harness these resources has become a consuming ambition for Sato. He reasoned
that if enough mangroves could be grown along the desert coast then cattle
and goats could be provided with food even when the rains failed and the country
was in the grip of drought.
Mangroves are
small bush-like trees and remarkable because unlike most plants they thrive
in seawater, growing between the high and low tide mark of coastlines around
the world.
Restoring mangroves
to areas where they previously thrived is recognised by environmentalists
as a good thing for the shelter and habitat they provide.
Where Sato's
work differs is that it creates a completely new landscape by growing mangroves
where they have never been seen before, and environmental protests are starting
to pick up.
About 15 percent
of Eritrea's coastline is covered with mangroves with the trees found in areas
where flash floods occasionally flow across the sand and into the sea.
To make them
grow in new locations Sato found he needed to provide each tree with fertiliser
in the form of a half kilo (one pound) plastic bag containing nitrogen and
phosphorus pierced in three places and buried at the tree's roots.
For Sato delivering
fertiliser like this ensures "trees take up all that we give them" and eliminates
run-off into the sea.
There has been
no environmental impact study or independent testing though -- and marine
biologists are warning that the chemicals could seriously damage the delicate
coral and fish life of the Red Sea.
"Corals thrive
in areas where there are low nutrients so the concern with using large amounts
of nutrients of any sort is that this will adversely affect and can actually
kill whole coral ecosystems," said Mark Spalding, co-author of the U.N.-backed
World Atlas of Coral Reefs.
MOUNTAIN HIDEOUTS
"You don't put
anything into the sea and it stay in the same place. The sea is a liquid --
the nutrients that have been put into the bags will dissolve and will then
spread far beyond the areas just of the trees themselves."
But Sato is not
short of friends in the Eritrean government.
During the final
years of the liberation struggle in the late 1980s he helped Eritrean revolutionaries
cultivate fish in their mountain hideouts.
Spalding has
no doubt that Sato's kind of scientific experiment would not be tolerated
in other parts of the world.
"It's not really
science if one goes ahead with something like this in the name of science
but one doesn't do the tests and the monitoring and don't publish the findings.
It's a rather worrying playing of games with the environment."
Sato says the
burden of proof is not with him but with the environmentalists who should
test whether he's actually changed the nutrient balance of the sea or damaged
the coral reef.
He prefers instead
to talk about the potential for mangrove plantations which he says can be
expanded beyond the coast of the Red Sea.
"This can be
done all over the world in similar climates like South America, Mexico or
Pakistan.
"Mangroves could
grow in deserts like the Sahara -- while at the same time contributing greatly
to carbon dioxide fixation (absorption) and eliminating the danger of global
warming."
In December 2002
the Manzanar Project won the prestigious Rolex Award for Enterprise, worth
$100,000, but attempts to attract more corporate funding have since been hindered
by environmental protests.
"What they're doing is bad for the world and bad for Eritrea," Sato said. "They have no concern for the fact that this country is on the verge of starvation, on the verge of famine and the people are chronically hungry -- and we could take care of that with the mangrove tree."
