He cleared land, built dams, planted out new strains of coffee bush and laid pipelines to drip feed the plants with water and fertiliser.

ECONOMIST: Feed the world

So it could be on the eurozone drip feed indefinitely.

BBC: Eurozone deal: Greek default could still happen

Warming ties with Baghdad in the past few years have put the country on a vital drip feed, as oil smuggled out of Iraq has been exchanged for Syrian consumer goods.

ECONOMIST: Syria hates the war, but is too weak to play the spoiler

But now the drip feed has been wrenched away.

ECONOMIST: GM and Chrysler: Wagoner��s fast exit | The

With the drip feed, then rush of media attention, the OpFacebook chat room is now booming with hundreds of new participants, increasing the likelihood there really could be some kind of attack on Facebook after all.

FORBES: Why The Anonymous Facebook 'Plot' Was A Dud

The constant drip-feed of bad news on the environment has inured us to the litany of loss.

BBC: Stark warning over the state of nature

There are pilot-projects with fast-growing trees that can be pollarded for firewood, and drip-feed irrigation for saplings.

ECONOMIST: Missing trees reflect the country's woeful recent history

Even without new seed varieties or fancy drip-feed irrigation, investment should help farmers.

ECONOMIST: Buying farmland abroad

Realistically, the most GM can hope for is that it will have done enough by March to keep the drip-feed going until the second half of 2009, when things may start to improve.

ECONOMIST: America's car industry

Over the past three months, a small team led by Daft Punk (Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo) and manager Paul Hahn has orchestrated a drip-feed marketing campaign that has left almost everything about the album up to the imagination.

WSJ: Daft Punk's Stealth Start for a Summer Hit