Paul Rice is the President & CEO of Fair Trade USA, a third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in the United States. He spent most of the 1980s working directly in the field with cooperative farmers, creating and implementing training programs aimed at developing small farmers’ organizational and business capacity.
Working for 11 years in the mountainous Segovias region of Nicaragua as a rural development specialist, Rice founded and became the first CEO of PRODECOOP in 1990, a Fair Trade organic cooperative representing almost 3,000 small coffee farmers in northern Nicaragua. He led PRODECOOP for 4 years, leading to sales in the European Fair Trade and gourmet coffee markets. Subsequently, Rice served as strategy consultant and development advisor to 22 cooperative enterprises in Latin America and Asia.
The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) founded Trans Fair USA in 1998 to open the specialty coffee market to small family farmers. Since IATP had also founded Peace Coffee, a 100% fair trade coffee company, they established TransFair USA as a stand-alone non-profit and hired Rice to lead it. Rice has received several international awards for his work, including: the Ashoka Fellowship, the Klaus Schwab Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship, Fast Company magazine’s Social Capitalist of the Year award (four-time winner), and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. Paul holds a Political Science degree from Yale University and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
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