Globalroamink’s Weblog

The nightly news has been reporting world wide rice shortages. There have been riots in Haiti because of a lack of food.

The country of Vietnam , one of the world’s top rice producers, recently announced it was cutting off exports of rice, preferring instead to keep all the rice it grows inside its own boundaries to feed its own people.

Closer to home, just this week Sam’s Club announced it was rationing the number of bags of rice that customers can buy – only four bags of rice per trip.

Even my local news crew got in on the story, interviewing the owners of popular Asian restaurants and asking whether or not the global rice shortage will affect their menu prices. Their answers – so far – were no.

So why all the fuss over some tiny grains of rice?

Well, a lot of people, the world over, count rice as a daily food staple. They relay on cheap and available rice so that they can continue to eat. If rice suddenly becomes scarce and expensive, then people will go hungry.

In fact, people are already going hungry. According to the United Nations, 25,000 people die every day from hunger. Most of these people are children.

And even though there is a rice shortage right now, there is still something you can do. You can play a really fun and addictive computer game.

The game is called Free Rice. Every time you answer a multiple-choice vocabulary question correctly, you earn grains of rice. The rice you earn gets donated to people who desperately need free rice in order to survive.

The site is supported by advertisers, which is how the site, which is operated by the United Nations World Food Program, is able to buy more rice to distribute.

Visit the site and give it a try. I dare you. It’s impossible to just answer one question. Before you know it, you’ll have passed 10 minutes on the site!