  The production and the final abundance of gravitino dark matter appear to
depend crucially on the restoration of the global U(1) $R$-symmetry of GMSB
sectors in a threefold way. An $R$-symmetric phase effectively suppresses the
production of goldstinos from scatterings with the supersymmetric Standard
Model particles and it generically initiates the goldstino production from the
thermalized messenger particles. In addition, the GMSB spurion gets displaced
from the zero temperature minimum and under certain conditions it dominates the
energy density of the universe producing late entropy. We show that it is
possible to have high enough reheating temperatures that thermal leptogenesis
and thermal vacuum selection can be realized without gravitino overproduction.
The gravitino dark matter can be produced either thermally or non-thermally. In
the former case the messenger scale has to be less than about $10^6$ GeV with
the gravitino relatively heavy, $m_{3/2}\geq {\cal O}(10)$ GeV. In the later
case, the gravitino is generically produced by the decay of the GMSB spurion
field a process that always takes place for large messenger scales. A
connection of our results with current collider and observational data is
performed.
