Speaker: Paul Rice, President and CEO, TransFair USA

Discussion Topic:

After 10 years of operation, TransFair USA, the only third-party certifier of Fair Trade goods in the US, has produced substantially impacts on rural farming communities throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The 334 million pounds of coffee certified by TransFair in that time translates to an estimated additional $140 million flowing into these communities. With awareness of Fair Trade building in the US and abroad, TransFair has moved far beyond Fair Trade coffee and now certifies cocoa, vegetables, nuts, honey, spices, wine, and many other products.

After guiding participants through a brief overview on the fundamentals of the Fair Trade model, TransFair CEO Paul Rice will look back on the market performance and mission impact of the organization in its first 10 years of operation. With a focus on the future, Paul will thereafter discuss innovative new initiatives the organization plans to undertake as well as the challenges faced in the current economic crisis.

About the Speaker:

Paul Rice is the President & CEO of TransFair USA, the only Fair Trade certification organization in the U.S. today. Since launching the Fair Trade Certified label for coffee nine years ago, Paul has helped establish Fair Trade as one of the fastest growing segments of the food industry. This success is rooted in TransFair’s innovative approach which helps companies incorporate social responsibility into their business strategies by igniting consumer awareness and building demand for certified products. The result: a market-based model for poverty alleviation and sustainable development that actually boosts growth, profitability and brand reputation.

To date, TransFair has developed business partnerships with over 650 US companies (including such leading brands as Starbucks, P&G, Green Mountain and Dunkin’ Donuts), launched Fair Trade coffee into 50,000 retail outlets nationwide, certified over 160 million pounds of Fair Trade coffee, and reached $1 billion in retail sales in 2007. TransFair is rapidly expanding Fair Trade certification into tea, chocolate, rice, sugar, bananas, flowers and wine. Fair Trade certification has helped open the US market to over 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.

Paul came to Fair Trade by way of the mountainous Segovias region of Nicaragua, where he worked for 11 years as a rural development specialist. He spent most of the 1980’s working directly in the field with cooperative farmers, creating and implementing training programs aimed at developing small farmers’ organizational and business capacity. This first-hand field experience gave him an understanding of the inherent weaknesses of the classic “development aid” model as well as insight into alternative, market-based approaches to sustainable development.

In 1990 Paul founded and became the first CEO of PRODECOOP, a highly successful Fair Trade organic cooperative representing almost 3,000 small coffee farmers in northern Nicaragua. He led PRODECOOP for 4 years, capturing market opportunities in the European Fair Trade and gourmet coffee markets, and introducing him to the power of Fair Trade as an innovative strategy for grassroots empowerment and sustainability. Subsequently, Paul served as strategy consultant and development advisor to 22 cooperative enterprises in Latin America and Asia. His first-hand experience over the last 25 years in the areas of global supply chain transparency, social auditing, sustainable agriculture and cooperative development is unique in the certification world. Paul is now a leading advocate of market linkage as a core strategy for farmer empowerment and sustainable development.

When the opportunity arose in 1998 to launch TransFair USA and open the specialty coffee market to small family farmers, Paul found his current role to be a natural evolution of his years in the field. Over the last eight years, TransFair has sought to reframe the industry’s conventional wisdom about the most effective response to poverty in the coffee communities, building innovative partnerships for sustainable solutions. Increasingly, the coffee industry is using Fair Trade as a business model that promotes sustainability, delivers value back to farmers and consumers, and builds profitability.

Paul has received numerous prestigious international awards for his pioneering work as a social entrepreneur in the Fair Trade movement, including: the Ashoka Fellowship (www.ashoka.org), the Klaus Schwab Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship (www.schwabfound.org), Fast Company magazine’s Social Capitalist of the Year award (four-time winner), and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship (www.skollfoundation.org). Paul holds a Political Science degree from Yale University and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. 



Presentation materials and conference access information will be distributed via direct email following registration.

Register Now

Location