Farmers say saltwater stress is easy to recognise: rice leaves turn yellow, while harvested grains become light and hollow because the plants fail to develop properly.
“The grains become almost empty,” Tombong Barrow explained. “The salt makes them useless.” The crisis has already altered daily life for many farming families in Kiang Jifarong and Sankandi, Lower River Region, the Gambia.
From Kiang Jifarong to Sankandi, a distance of 5 kilometers, the rice fields stretch toward the estuary in a landscape where water is everywhere, but not all water is useful. Patches of green sit beside bare, waterlogged earth; barren, salt-dotted fields stretch toward the distant mangroves that mark the river’s tidal edge.
Jonni Kinteh, Mama Njie and Tombong Barrow, all veteran rice farmers, read this landscape differently. They remembered when these lowlands were reliably productive, when rice filled the fields, and harvests fed households year-round. Now they watch salt creep inland, turning once-fertile paddies into increasingly saltwater-infested fields.
The muddy rice fields were once central to the food security of generations of families. Farmers depended on seasonal rainfall, freshwater, and the natural movement of water through the lowlands. Today, some of those fields have been abandoned, while farmers have moved toward higher ground in search of land they can still cultivate.
Tombong Barrow, a lifelong farmer and focal person for the Kiang Jifarong Village Development Committee, has watched that retreat firsthand. The VDC usually comprises key community figures who are tasked with working with local government authorities for the implementation of development projects in their respective communities in The Gambia.
“Our parents farmed much closer to the river. Now those fields have been completely taken over by salt. We’ve had to move uphill, into areas that were never meant for rice cultivation,” Barrow told Mansa Banko Online.
The changes are unfolding against a broader climate shift. The World Bank’s 2026 Country Climate and Development Report for The Gambia says temperatures have risen by about 1°C since 1960, rainfall has declined by nearly 30%, and rainfall variability, intense flooding, and drought are expected to worsen. The report also says sea-level rise and coastal erosion threaten about 8% of the country’s land and 20% of its rice fields.
For farmers in Kiang Jifarong and Sankandi, saltwater intrusion is not simply an abstract climate projection. It arrives with the tides.
Kawsu Jammeh, The Gambia’s national focal point for the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, says saltwater naturally spreads deep into mudflats during spring tides and is normally flushed back toward the estuary during the rainy season.
The problem becomes harder to reverse when saline water enters rice fields and becomes trapped behind poorly designed dykes. “Once salt penetrates concrete dykes into the rice fields, which is possible through underneath the dykes, the runoff from rain cannot flush it back,” Jammeh said. “Therefore, the fields are affected by salt and abandoned eventually.”
The community has tried to fight back.
In the 1990s, the government built concrete culverts to regulate water movement between the estuary and rice fields. But farmers say the infrastructure has deteriorated. Since then, villagers have largely relied on their own labour and money to rebuild earthen dykes from clay and mud.
“Heavy rains and strong tides destroy the dykes almost every year,” Barrow said. “For the past eight years, we’ve appealed to different institutions for technical support, but we are still struggling on our own.”
Jammeh says temporary dykes can work, but many fail when they are built in the wrong place or with unsuitable materials. He argues that traditional seasonal dykes made from clay and mud can be better suited to the wetland environment than rigid concrete structures.
“It also depends on where the dykes are constructed,” he said. “They should be placed between the highest water mark and the rice fields. If they are built within the saltwater margins, they can render large areas of farmland unusable.”
The lesson is not that all dykes fail. It is that where and how they are built matters.
In Tendaba, roughly 22 kilometers from Kiang Jifarong, farmers report a different experience. Bakay Marong said a dyke constructed through a UNDP-supported coastal resilience project helped arrest salt intrusion into rice fields and increased yields during the harvest period.
Additionally, according to Abdoulie Sawo, Principal Wildlife Conservation Officer at the Department of Parks and Wildlife of The Gambia, the Participatory Integrated Watershed Management Project (PIWAMP) constructed dykes and spillways and helped make almost 6,000 hectares of previously unproductive lowlands productive in Faraba Banta and Kassange communities, West Coast Region.
The Gambia Lowland Development Project (GALDEP) also successfully constructed water-retention and anti-salt dykes and spillways in rice-growing areas of the Jenoi, Jarumeh Koto, Central River Region, North Bank Region, Lower River Region and West Coast Region respectively. Research on the project found that the sustainability of such structures depended heavily on social, economic and land-management conditions.
But the Bintang Bolong estuary offers a warning about what can happen when engineering ignores ecology.
Kawsu Jammeh says wrongly constructed dykes restricted tidal movement in parts of the estuary, contributing to severe mangrove dieback. As mangroves disappeared, he said, fish declined because water temperatures increased; rice paddies were lost to saltwater; aquatic mammals lost habitat; and water birds lost feeding and nesting areas.
He links some of these changes to historical interventions in the estuary, including sandbags reportedly used to obstruct tidal flow. After the sandbags were removed in 2005, he said, water circulation resumed, acid-sulphate soils began to stabilize, mangroves, including Avicennia species, began regenerating, and aquatic life returned.
The ecological consequences are therefore not confined to rice.
Ansumana Darboe, a climate activist from Sankandi and coordinator of the Nnaa Samaa Mankolu mangrove restoration initiative, remembers the Bintang Bolong as having extensive natural mangrove forests before the severe drought of the late 1970s. He says degradation and hypersalinity have since affected wetlands and rice production, while farmers displaced from lowlands increasingly clear higher ground for cultivation.
“Mangroves are among our strongest natural defenses,” Darboe said. “They are highly salt-tolerant and play an important role in reducing the impacts of saltwater intrusion while protecting biodiversity.”
The farmers are also turning to improved rice varieties. Under the Ministry of Agriculture’s GIRAV project, WARR 77 and ISRIZ 10 (Nerica rice) were identified as salt-tolerant varieties suitable for lowland and irrigated ecologies. The African Development Bank’s recently completed Rice Value Chain Transformation Programme likewise says improved varieties resilient to flooding and salinity intrusion were introduced to strengthen climate resilience in the rice sector.
For Tombong Barrow, such varieties have helped.
“Rice matures within three months and has become more reliable than many other crops because rainfall patterns have changed,” he said. “The improved rice varieties introduced by the Ministry of Agriculture have also helped us adapt.”
Kinteh and Njie say they abandoned their rice fields about eight years ago after repeated crop failures. “We have farmed these fields since childhood alongside our mothers,” Kinteh said. “Now we can no longer use them.”
Njie remembers a time when imported rice was rarely needed. “Before the saltwater came, we hardly bought imported rice,” she said. “Now we have no choice.”
For Darboe, the answer lies somewhere beyond the choice between concrete and mud. Community-led mangrove restoration, he argues, could restore some of the natural protection that once existed along the estuary while creating habitat for fish, birds and other wildlife. But restoration requires financing, and emerging blue-carbon markets have yet to provide a dependable income stream for communities.
“Communities possess generations of ecological knowledge,” Darboe said. “That indigenous knowledge must work together with science to develop lasting solutions.”
The farmers of Kiang Jifarong and Sankandi are not simply fighting a rising tide. They are trying to rebuild a relationship between rice fields, rivers, mangroves and tides that earlier interventions sometimes disrupted.
The future may involve earthen dykes, gated water-control structures, improved salt-tolerant rice, and mangrove restoration, but the experience of Bintang Bolong suggests that no barrier can succeed for long if it works against the wetland itself.
For farmers like Barrow, the question is no longer whether the salt will return. It is whether the next generation will still have rice fields to return to when it does.
