Paul Rice Detailed Bio

Paul Rice, President and CEO
TransFair USA

Paul Rice is the founding President and CEO of TransFair USA, the only independent, third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in the U.S. today. Fair Trade Certified™ is an innovative, market-based approach to sustainable development that helps farmers and workers in the global South benefit from international trade, while offering a simple way for consumers to know that their products were produced in a responsible manner.

As noted by Fast Company magazine, Rice is a true “rebel in the boardroom.” Since his early days at Yale University, Rice saw the key to empowering small coffee farmers involved creating a business model that could better provide them access to the global consumer marketplace. He also persuaded manufacturers and retailers to recognize consumers' growing concern for social and environmental issues. His push-pull strategy works to develop close partnerships and a leadership role for TransFair USA within both industry and the consumer movement.

Rice’s first-hand experience during the last 20 years in the development of cooperative coffee export ventures around the world is unparalleled in the U.S. coffee industry. Previously, Rice worked for 11 years as a rural development specialist in the mountainous Segovias region of Nicaragua, where he founded and led a highly successful organic coffee export cooperative called PRODECOOP. In 2000 he received the prestigious international Ashoka Fellowship (www.ashoka.org) for his pioneering work as a social entrepreneur in the Fair Trade movement. Rice was also honored by the Klaus Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship as one of the world's top 40 Social Entrepreneurs in 2002, and has been given the Social Capitalist Award from Fast Company magazine for the past four consecutive years.

More recently, Rice spoke on Fair Trade at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2004 and 2005. Rice has authored several publications, including Sustainable Coffee at the Crossroads (Consumer Choice Council, 1999), which analyzes the emerging U.S. market for sustainable coffee.

TransFair USA currently certifies coffee, tea, cocoa, fresh fruit, rice, sugar, flowers and vanilla. Producers have historically been at a disadvantage in these industries, receiving a very small portion of the profits. Fair Trade certification has helped open the U.S. market to more than 1.4 million small family farmers around the world who are now getting a fair price for their harvests and making dramatic gains in their living standards.

Since launching the Fair Trade Certified label nine years ago, TransFair USA has established Fair Trade as the fastest growing segment of the $19 billion coffee industry. To date, TransFair USA has developed business partnerships with more than 700 U.S. coffee companies (including leading brands such as Starbucks, P&G, Green Mountain and Dunkin' Donuts), launched Fair Trade coffee into more than 40,000 retail outlets nationwide, certified more than 184 million pounds of Fair Trade coffee, and generated more than $91 million in additional income for small coffee farmers around the world.

Rice holds an Economics and Political Science degree from Yale University and a master’s degree from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He resides in the Bay Area with his wife, son and daughters.