Posted by Benjamin on: 11.08.2007 /
I recently found this really gnarley little program (H/T Helen and Sharon) on the web called free rice. It’s a vocabulary building program with a justice and comassion twist. It helps you expand your English vocuabulary, and for every word you get right, the people at free rice donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme. It began on October 7 (about a month ago) and has already given 681 million grains of rice! This is totally perfect for me, as I am a very amateur philologist, and I’m totally stoked to see food getting donated to the hungry. Try it out. Today I learned “augur” which means “foretell”
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Comment by: joe
1 11/8/07 3:17 AM | Comment Link |I think that is crap. If they have rice to donate, why do they need anyone to click, learn words or anything else??
Comment by: Sharon
2 11/8/07 4:07 AM | Comment Link |Joe- I have to admit I was skeptical about this program… I still am. My problem is that the program really doesn’t do anything to encourage giving or helping beyond sitting at the computer and clicking the mouse.
The rice is bought with money generated by the advertisements at the bottom of the page, so I guess it’s not sitting there waiting to be donated. I think it is a clever little way of re-distributing wealth, and although the amounts are probably very small (how many grains in a bowl of rice?), in this case something is probably better than nothing.
And it will improve your vocabulary!
Comment by: joe
3 11/8/07 4:53 AM | Comment Link |Giving that costs nothing is worth nothing.
I don’t believe there is any value in the kind of ethical mindgames played by this and other websites that imply you can make a difference to starving people by clicking on a website and/or learning a few words (worthy as that may be).
If you want to give rice, then give some money to someone who is doing that. Don’t pretend that something like this is doing anything other than making some advertising executive richer.
Comment by: Benjamin Ady
4 11/8/07 7:15 AM | Comment Link |Joe.
The thing I love about you is that you just say what you think. That rocks.
But I still think that free rice is really kewl. Becausue I think that increasing literacy is somewhere rather high ont he importance scale as well. And they are doing that as well as feeding poor people. They are increasing the number of the luminous on two fronts (cause you can’t really learn to read when you’re starving, y’know?)
Comment by: joe
5 11/8/07 8:08 AM | Comment Link |I’ll take Hugo and raise you Gandhi, Benjamin ;)
Any giving which costs nothing is worthless, just as any religion which has no demands of sacrifice is worthless.
Sharon has given about 200g of rice from her word collection. This is about the amount I would cook in a meal for my family, which might cost me around a dollar. If you’re buying in bulk from somewhere like the USA where there is an overproduction of rice, I doubt they’re paying much more than a few cents per kilo.
Meanwhile, this great ‘philanthropy’ is causing massive traffic to the site, which is probably yielding something approaching a dollar a click from advertisers.
Yes, it is good you want to increase your vocabulary. Yes it is good you want to feed the hungry. I’m not arguing that these are not good things.
But find something which really achieves those goals (if you really must do them both simultaneously) rather than bogus nonsense like this.
[edit] and of course, the US government regularly gives billions of ‘dollars’ of surplus food - which must represent a massive volume of rice. This swamps local markets and is often seen as hurting developing countries rather than helping.
This is not a win-win situation, it is a cynical lose-loseevenmore situation.
Comment by: Rachel
6 11/8/07 8:56 AM | Comment Link |Joe, your critique reminds me of King David’s saying, “I will not give God that which costs me nothing.”
Comment by: Benjamin Ady
7 11/8/07 9:36 AM | Comment Link |why is giving which costs nothing worthless.
I can see that it might be worth less to the giver. But how is it worth less to the recipients?
who defines “costs nothing”?
Does “worth less” have to *mean* “worthless”?
(on an aside, I remember once trying to explain “priceless” to a young lady from Argentina, and her thinking it meant “worthless”. It took a while to explain.)
just throwing stuff out here.
ok, truth is, I like vocabulary building games of this sort. So I’m predisposed to like free rice. I mean I could do this at home with a dictionary. Would that be somehow *better* than doing it at free rice?
Comment by: joe
8 11/8/07 9:58 AM | Comment Link |Because giving which has cost the giver nothing is only an exercise in vanity - often causing more problems to the recipient that the gift was worth.
For example, a current scheme regularly found in British schools and churches involves packing unwanted toys and small items into shoeboxes to send to Eastern Europe for Christmas.
The problems are manyfold. First, there is an inevitable difference in the quality of goods given, causing resentment within communities and between communities which have and those which have not been given the goods. Second, given the volume, it would be vastly more efficient to bulk buy toys and ship them wholesale to the country or even buy them inside the country.
It is only done this way to generate massive fanfare, to make the givers feel great about themselves and to keep the charityworkers involved employed.
Giving a dollar to a charity which feeds the hungry would be more efficient than many hours clicking on the rice website. If you want to test your word power, get a freeware programme from the internet or buy a newspaper and do the crossword.
Comment by: David H
9 11/8/07 12:28 PM | Comment Link |I’m not sure this is what should be considered charity. The more apt description would probably be redistribution of wealth. They get advertisers to give them money for the eyeballs on the page. That is simple commerce and being done every day on the internet. The World Food Program then takes some of that money and buys rice with it (how much actually goes to good is important, but given the UN connection it may not be very efficient in that respect). They could solicit funds directly from the advertisers, but with this they are selling them something and that should increase advertiser participation.
I doubt they are getting $1 per click. Based on this type of advertising, my guess would be in the pennies range. Google ad click (actually clicking on one of their ads) generally pay less than 10 cents each. The advertisers here may pay a premium for an actual click-through, but they are also paying just to have you look at their doo-dads.
As for it costing nothing, the question is how much is time worth? Will this raise awareness? Will you track back to the parent organization and figure out what they are doing, the scope of the issue they are fighting, etc.? Will someone be educated by this transaction?
This is not something for everyone. Many who care will go directly to a charity and give money (btw, you can donate directly if you can find your way to the parent organization site, which is a bit of a chore and should be fixed). But there is potential for engagement on the subject of world hunger by people who might otherwise blithely ignore the subject (no, blithely wasn’t one of the words I saw when I did it).
The most important thing with internet efforts isn’t size of transactions but the number of them. Everything depends on audience. So 10 grains per word seems like nothing. But from Oct. 7 to Nov. 7, according to their website, they have accrued advertising dollars sufficient to buy nearly 1 billion grains. If nothing else that might show some people how just a little effort could play a role in solving the world hunger problem. Sure governments could and should play a role, but that little effort could also go toward making that happen. But most important is the concept it doesn’t require massive amounts of money and time and effort. Helping with world hunger isn’t a job that is too big for a 12-year-old surfing the net or a suburban Dad reading a blog or anyone with a few minutes to kill. Small acts by little people can make a difference. If people only learn that it could make a difference.
Comment by: David H
10 11/8/07 12:36 PM | Comment Link |One of the words I got right was footle.
Is all of this just footle?
I don’t think so.
Comment by: benjamin ady
11 11/8/07 12:49 PM | Comment Link |Joe,
What I hear you saying, in a more … global, big picture picture sense, is that “western, rich nations” can and often do cause more problems than we fix by our uneducated, uncostly, unthought out giving.
Am I getting that right?
That makes a lot of sense to me. It kind of reflects a lot of our lives here in the west, perhaps especially in America–rushing headlong through our lives consuming, destroying, etc. with nary a spare second to be present, to think.
On the other hand, I’m still not super clear on what the exact problem with this specific free rice program is. I’m taking a wild guess and assuming that the people who work for the united nations world food programme are at some level educated about all this stuff we are talking about, and actually spend time thinking it through, and are probably doing a lot more good than harm in the world. So if Free Rice is giving them rice, how is that hurting anybody?
Comment by: joe
12 11/8/07 1:27 PM | Comment Link |My business uses googleads. The click-thru price is dependent on the popularity of the search, but is frequently in the range of 70 cents to 1 dollar for each click.
Benjamin, my problem is that this is not free - the person who benefits most is the website owner rather than the recipient of the rice. You’ve been had.
Yes, small acts of kindness are valuable. But there are smaller and more valuable acts that have more lasting effect than this will ever have. A billion grains? Big deal. Thats like 20 tons of rice (1 grain of rice weighs about 20mg).
Comment by: David H
13 11/8/07 1:47 PM | Comment Link |And there are probably web sites touting those. Perhaps we should turn our attention there. This is a UN thing, so we could probably spend hours (days even) arguing about whether the UN does anything useful at all. If there are better things to do, then do them.
Comment by: joe
14 11/8/07 1:56 PM | Comment Link |Which is nearly 450 cwt, and according to the USDA the average price for rice is less than $10 per cwt (pretty scary website, by the way).
So our friends have contributed approximately $4,500 worth of rice.
And in the process generated around 1,000,000 separate visits to their advertising based website.
Comment by: joe
15 11/8/07 2:17 PM | Comment Link |See This and this about the man behind the freerice website.
Comment by: David H
16 11/8/07 7:24 PM | Comment Link |My reading of the links seems to indicate that while the site may not be eradicating hunger it also isn’t likely to make the founder a multi-millionaire. Also, he isn’t asking normal people to give money, he is getting corporations to spend advertising dollars on this. Would this money go to any charity otherwise. His hunger site got 3.5 cents per visit in advertising. Half-a-cent went to the page maker. That is about $50,000 if there have been a million visitors.Not bad, but if the advertisers don’t see value they won’t pay.
Bottom line, I need more information before deciding this is a scam. Is it something I intend to do on a regular basis? No. Not my cup of tea. But I’m not sure it is evil even if it won’t actually solve the problem.
Comment by: Meg
17 11/9/07 7:21 PM | Comment Link |i think this rice thing is good. for heavens sake, those of us discussing this all live in capitalist countries, where usually the biggest ‘moral’ measure is ‘does it make money?’ if an endeavour such as this one makes money for itself whilst also being charitable, that’s GOOD! stop being so dang fussy!
Comment by: Benjamin Ady
18 11/9/07 11:15 PM | Comment Link |I found this today regarding free rice. someone wrote a script to automatically do the clicking, which can sit there and run all day and thus generate rice for the wfp while generating nothing for the advertisers. which is kind of … robin hoodish, almost (steal from the the rich, give to the poor, Robin Hood, Robin Hood …) (Oh dear, now I’m going to get in trouble)
Comment by: Julie Clawson
19 11/10/07 11:23 AM | Comment Link |Okay regardless of the charity aspect, this site is addicting. But maybe I’m just a nerd.
Comment by: April Terry
20 11/15/07 3:37 PM | Comment Link |I agree about the addicting part…I totally spent two hours putting rice in a bowl. There must be some form of hypnosis going on that we don’t know about or I have a deep-seeded need to escape from all reality and learn vocabulary words all day. I’d better get in touch with my therapist.
Comment by: Anna
21 12/7/07 5:35 PM | Comment Link |My teacher told me about it in reading class and I think its awesome! It’s pretty fun and yah, really addicting. Its kewl how you increase your vocabulary and give to the poor at the same time.