Most of the pumping machines and their irrigation canals were constructed 30 years ago, thus they had serve their useful life time and urgently need major redesigning and reconstruction to enable year round production. Machines that are in good condition to pump water from the river to the rice fields. Today, most of the pump irrigated fields in CRR are not in operation as a result of very old and worn out irrigation infrastructures and inability of farmers to provide fuel for pumping

These fields were provided with pump irrigation facilities with concrete canals to supply fresh water to thousands of hectares thereby facilitating year round production of rice. These projects constructed the initial irrigation infrastructures of many rice fields in Central River Region such as Jahally Pacharr rice fields, Janjanbureh and Sankulay Kunda rice fields. In 1998 another rice project called Rice Irrigation Development Project (RIDEP) started to boost irrigated rice production in CRR. However, the Gambia has never been able to attain this even though it had its golden years in the 1980s with the implementation of a rice irrigation project at the Jahally and Pacharr Smallholder Rice Development fields covering 1,474 hectares in the McCarthy Island Division in 1982. According to experts, the region has the potential of meeting the rice demand of not only the region but the entire country. Countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan just to mention few are able to achieve signicant success in rice production and they are major global exporters of rice.Ĭentral River Region of The Gambia is the region that is most endowed with abundant fertile land and flesh water due to its uniqueness of accupying majority of the flesh water areas of the river Gambia. Generally, it is assumed that countries that are endowed with these resources should hugely exceed the expected annual yield of rice for rice self sufficiency or food self sufficiency.

The two most critical factors for attaining food self sufficiency in the area of rice production are abundant availability of fertile land and fresh water.

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