Great Idea, Challange to the Evoke Developers.

And idea...

This is just an idea I'm throwing around after looking at World Without Oil and Evoke.

But the basic concept is to talk to facebook, and possibly any other small games development sites and maybe even Blizzard to see if they'd get in on it.

And create a game. A real honest to goodness game, like farm ville only dealing with real farming and real farming techniques and issues in Africa.

Give people so much money to buy a plot of land when they sign up and so much to get a few things. Then they can either just play as is and try to scrape by with that or they can invest real money to get game "Bonuses" (Like Tinier Me or Gaia Online) the bonuses can be little (like items for their character, cool clothing and whatnot) or big items like seeds for their farm, more fertilizer or tools to build other things.

Real issues can crop up in game such as drought or seed prices rising or falling or even politics in the region driving them off of their land.

And making it an MMO would be for the best (if dealing with facebook or blizzard) so that if something happens then they can band together with others to make their group farms work.

The idea of paying real money for in game "bonuses" would then be that the real money would go towards real copy farms of these peoples farms. So when they put money into the game to buy seeds for their region, real seeds are bought for real farmers who are paired up with their "net farms" when items are bought for the avatars similar items are given to the real farmers.
Certain innovation in game "gifts" can then be given to players if their matched farm does something unexpected with their "bonus bought items" so if someone buys a lot of clothing for their character and the real farmer makes a business of making and selling other clothes then the gamer can have access to the added resources of that and open up new areas of the game where maybe they take on other jobs then farming.

ten million dollars are spent every month on world of warcraft at least.
$165,000 is spent on Gaia online at a minimum every month if not much more.
hundreds of thousands of dollars are put into facebook games.

Not only is it a potential business plan for a game that could run and earn money on a yearly scale but the potential to both educate and assist people around the world is enough to at least place some serious consideration into it.

other concepts with it is to also have the wh*** "comic thing" going on as well as the blogging abilities (so people can talk about and share farming ideas, techniques and what not) and to even give gift bonuses for people who do local things that are really good. *Bonus powers, gifts or abilities if they make a local farm or do extra research into something or write into newspapers and get people to donate to a cause, IRL involvement that gives in game prizes. Like Blizcon)