Paul Rice « Skoll Foundation

FairTrade USA

Skoll Entrepreneur(s): Paul Rice
Focus Area(s) Addressed: Sustainable Markets
Award Year: 2005

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DESCRIPTION:

After working for more than a decade in Central America and helping Nicaraguan coffee farmers improve their livelihoods through an organic coffee export cooperative, Paul Rice founded FairTrade USA (also known as TransFair USA) in 1998 to bring the fair trade movement to the United States.

FairTrade USA promotes a market model that guarantees small-family agricultural producers a fair price for their products, direct trade and access to credit and support for sustainable agriculture. Fair Trade USA is the leading independent, third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in the United States. Fair Trade USA audits and certifies transactions between U.S. companies that offer Fair Trade products and their international suppliers to guarantee compliance with Fair Trade principles.

And as a development agency, Fair Trade USA educates consumers, builds supply chains for Fair Trade, brings new manufacturers and retailers into the system, and provides farming communities with tools, training and resources to thrive as international businesspeople.

IMPACT AS OF JAN. 2013:

Enabled family farmers in the developing world to earn nearly $225 million in above-market income, bringing dramatic improvements in health, housing and education to their communities. Companies now taking part in Fair Trade include a rapidly growing range of powerful mainstream retailers and other industry leaders.
The Fair Trade Certified™ label offers consumers a simple way to know that their products were produced in a socially-responsible manner. The third-party verification guarantees that strict social, economic and environmental standards have been met. Now more than 11,000 different products can be found in over 70,000 retail locations across the United States.
Trained and empowered over 10,000 family farmers in Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia and Rwanda to boost their incomes and living standards by improving crop quality and strengthening cooperative management capacity.
By the end of Dec. 2011, the latest numbers that are available, there were 1,030 Fair Trade farmer and worker organizations and 1.5 million individual farmers and workers. This led to 5 million beneficiaries.
Retail sales in 2010 were $1.2 billion. In March 2012, Fair Trade USA reported new data revealing that sales of Fair Trade Certified™ products grew 75 percent between Q1 and Q4 2011.
Learn more: http://fairtradeusa.org/what-is-fair-trade/impact

SEE THEIR WORK IN ACTION:

So much of the developing world today, faces the situation of absolute poverty.

You're working from dawn to dusk for two to three dollars a day.

They are struggling to put food on the table.

They struggle to keep their kids in school.
Those things become everyday battles.

Farmers sell to local middleman and that middleman dictates price.

So, of course that have a locks formers into a situation of poverty, because of they are getting pennies on the dollar.

For their coffee, or their flowers, their bananas, whatever it is they're producing. In southern Ecuador, Victor Cecilima Junior had to quit school to help support his family after he finished sixth grade.
He seemed to following in the footsteps of his father, whose own education had come to an abrupt halt decades earlier. But in 2010 , eighteen years after he dropped out, Victor Jr. became the first person in his family to graduate from high school.
He's learning how to use a computer and preparing to study agronomy in college.
His father went back to school too and is now studying math .
Changes made possible, because they now get a fair price for their bananas.

You know, poor farmers don't want our charity.
They just want a fair price.
If farmers can find a market for their products and go directly to that market. And they can get much much more money for their harvest.

It's called fair trade.
And it means not only paying farmers more, but also making sure they grow food in a way that protects the environment.

In the United States, products that have been certified to meet the rigorous fair trade standards carry a logo from TransFair USA, an organization whose roots date back to 1990, when founder Paul Rice helped a handful of Nicaraguan farmers start a coffee cooperative.

Our first year, we were able to pull together twenty-four brave souls who filled one container of fantastic coffee and we sold it to a fair trade buyer who paid us $1.24 per pound at a time when the local market price was ten cents.

Within the next two years we were able to bring 3,000 families into this co-op that was getting three, four, five times more than they would have otherwise. And that in turn generated this whole process of community development.

And it made me realize that the market is not the enemy, the market is actually the most powerful lever for change that we have.

Starting with coffee in 1999, TransFair USA has since expanded its certification program to dozens of products, such as sugar, tea, chocolate, flowers and bananas. They're sold in thousands of stores, small and large, including Starbucks and Costco, Wal-Mart and Whole Foods Market.

Fair trade certified producers are providing a higher quality product. And we believe that the customer understands that there is something unique about the products that we sell.

Because of the care that's been taken in those product's production.

For a farmer to recievve fair trade status, he or she has to meet a two-hundred point check list of social, economic, and environmental criteria.

It's not easy.

Everything to be chopped for compost.

Compost.

That's right.

Compost.

Edwardo owns the Oja Verde plantation in Northern Ecuador. Of the countries 400 rose farms, it's one of only 10 that have earned fair trade certification.

It is very important for us to have our consumers assured that we are using less pesticide. That we are having less impact in the way we produce. And his guarantee by a third person that we are doing something right.

And doing something right means not only protecting the environment, but also taking care of the workers like Yohana Quitiaqez. Before she got her credit, her job at Oja Verde.

She worked at a conventional rose farm

Fair trade has without a doubt changed Yohana 's life.

She makes better wages and she has access to benefits that would not be available on another farm.

Benefits like regular onsite medical care when a routine check-up showed early-stage cancer.

Yohana received free treatment , that may have saved her life. In addition to getting medical benefits , workers at use the extra many from fair trade to create their own home loan fund .

In 2009, Johanna borrowed $5,000 to buy her own plot of land. By making the purchase of the fair trade product , you can be assured that you are making a difference.
That you are helping to save the environment.
That you are helping to lift people out of poverty. That you are improving the world.

In just ten years fair trade has become a mainstream phenomenon.

In the United States, shoppers can now find certified products at more than fifty thousand retail stores.

All across the country, consumers are stepping up and voting with their dollars by buying fair trade products.

It's not just about helping farmers find their voice It's about helping us find ours.

Skoll Foundation

FairTrade USA

CONTACT INFO

LOCATION

We're at Sundance!

Paul Rice is a Finalist in Entrepreneur of 2012 Contest

What is Empowerment? Our Principal's Visit to Fair Trade USA in Colombia

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