The Daily Cow

Just in case you might have missed it, we received a quasi-official response from WFP over our FreeRice AutoClicker endeavor. Least to say, they're not happy:

Dear Jinghao,

After reading your Blog, I am writing to you on behalf of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), official partner and beneficiary of FreeRice, with an urgent request to please withdraw the FreeRice Autoclicker programme. It is undermining FreeRice.com’s efforts to help the world’s 852 million hungry people on three fronts:

1. Limiting the number of people who can play the game;
2. Weakening efforts to raise awareness of global hunger;
3. Claiming, without proof, that FreeRice is a scam.

By overloading the FreeRice servers, the Autoclicker is making it more difficult for would-be supporters to play the game, learn vocabulary and, ultimately, click to donate. You might respond that Autoclick replaces manual clicks with guaranteed automatic clicks, but a computer programme can never replace the real long-term benefit of FreeRice.com: raising global awareness of hunger among millions of real people.

One of WFP’s biggest battles in its efforts to feed the hungry is getting the issue on the agenda: it is a little known fact that hunger kills more people every year than tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria combined (a World Health Organization statistic). At the moment, by blocking the FreeRice server, your programme is denying people the right to learn about the world’s hunger problem – and also the right to play the game.

Autoclicker is also having a second negative impact on FreeRice. Without the guarantee that real people can access the game, it is no longer cost-effective for companies to advertise. Without advertising, there can be no donation and, ultimately, no rice.

I appreciate that your motivation for encouraging fellow bloggers to download AutoClicker may be well-meant but, as WFP’s web manager, I can assure you that it is based on a false premise --- that FreeRice is a scam.

WFP is an official partner of FreeRice and fully endorses the work of John Breen. Each month, Mr.Breen donates the cash equivalent of the grains collected on FreeRice.com to our organisation. The rice is paid for by the advertisers whose names appear on the bottom of the vocabulary screen.

Mr.Breen has used WFP's standard costs to calculate the value of the rice raised and the number of beneficiaries. These WFP costs include the value of the rice purchased and the associated costs, such as transport, storage, distribution, etc, to deliver the rice to our beneficiaries. John runs his site on his own. It's true that he is not registered as a charity, but he runs FreeRice "at no profit", giving all the money he raises to WFP – and is already making a difference.

WFP can vouch that rice purchased with FreeRice donations has helped feed refugees from Myanmar sheltering in Bangladesh. Our own website currently carries a video (http://www.wfp.org/english/?ModuleID=137&Key=2740) showing this rice being distributed to the refugees and includes a quote from an extremely grateful aid worker. More rice is being purchased for pregnant and nursing women in Cambodia and school children in Uganda – all less than six months after FreeRice was launched.

This Blog, our website’s special FreeRice section (http://www.wfp.org/english/?n=681) and, ultimately, the hungry children in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Uganda all represent irrefutable evidence that FreeRice does donate rice to the World Food Programme. Please withdraw Autoclicker from your Blog and stop encouraging people to use it – at the moment you could make no bigger contribution to helping the world’s hungry.

With best regards,
Chris Endean
Web Content Manager
United Nations World Food Programme

So... now what? We've heard from the authorities, and both our side and their side have pretty valid proofs for the other's shortcomings. Best we shake hands, ignore everything and anything that happened, and move on with our lives? FreeRice does seem to be working, after all, and who best to tell us that than the web content manager of WFP?