Paul Rice Short 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.

Rice worked in the mountains of Nicaragua from 1983-94 on various grassroots economic development projects. In 1990, he founded PRODECOOP, a consortium of 52 cooperatives representing 3,000 small coffee farmers in northern Nicaragua, which became one of the largest organic coffee exporters in 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.