BELLE CHASSE, La. (AP) — A first-of-its-kind project will pipe mud dredged from the Mississippi River into a section of south Louisiana’s badly eroded wetlands to help fight the state’s staggering land loss, Gov. Bobby Jindal announced Tuesday.

Jindal said using mud from the Mississippi and other rivers passing through south Louisiana was a fast and cheap way to make land along the receding coast, where hurricanes and rising seas have combined to threaten fishing villages, ports and entire cities. Since the 1930s, south Louisiana has lost about 2,000 square miles of coastal wetlands.

For years, scientists and engineers have toyed with the idea of building a network of mud pipelines and dumping sediment on submerged land. Jindal said it was a good solution.

‘‘This is simply one of the most effective, economic ways to reverse this land loss,’’ Jindal said at a ceremony in Belle Chasse, a town south of New Orleans in Plaquemines Parish on the edge of the marshland.

‘‘Dumping tons and tons of sediment every year in the deep waters of the Gulf or just piling it up in inland areas is a just a waste.’’

About 200 million tons of mud, silt and sand wash down the Mississippi River system every year, and much of that muck flows into the Gulf of Mexico.

‘‘This same sediment is what built south Louisiana over thousands of years,’’ Jindal said. ‘‘I meant it when the time for studies is over.’’

Every year, the Army Corps of Engineers dredges about 60 million cubic yards of mud to clear Louisiana’s waterways, and traditionally very little of that mud has been used to make wetlands.

Jindal said he wants that practice to end.

He said building more mud pipelines and using what’s in the rivers could create 18 square miles of marsh a year and cut the state’s annual land loss rate by as much as two-thirds.

This test case is called the Mississippi River Sediment Delivery System at Bayou Dupont, which Jindal said would prove the theory works.

First, crews will lay a pipeline that’s 36 inches in diameter about 6 miles from the Mississippi to Bayou Dupont, a submerged wetland on the east side of the levees protecting Plaquemines. At the same time, marsh buggies — which are basically waterborne backhoes — will build a 3-foot-high containment dike around a 500-acre area. Once that work is done, a cutter-head dredge will suck up muck from the river and pump it into the pipes. Over time, the piped mud will fill up the area contained by the marsh dike.

Jindal hopes to have the work done by the middle of August at a cost of about $28 million.

Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, said he would like to see more sediment pipes up and down the river.

Building up wetlands and creating new ridges in the marsh is needed to fight land loss and hurricanes, Nungesser said.

‘‘We should never dump the sediment offshore again,’’ he said.

‘‘This is more important than the schools and fire houses. We need this.’’