05 Oct 2003 01:04:01 GMT

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."