Paul Rice is the Founder & CEO of Fair Trade USA, the leading third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in North America. Since launching Fair Trade USA (formally called TransFair) in 1998, Rice has brought Fair Trade into the mainstream and built a movement to expand its impact. He has challenged and collaborated with hundreds of companies to rework their global supply chains to obtain high-quality products that support community development and environmental protection. His work as a social entrepreneur has helped over 1 million farming and producing families to receive a fair price for their crops and to compete in the global marketplace through direct, long-term contracts with international buyers. With thousands of certified products found in 200,000 retail locations today, Fair Trade USA's Fair Trade Certified label is considered to be the leading mark of sustainability and responsible sourcing in North America. Rice has been criticized in recent years for his decision to resign Fair Trade USA's membership from Fairtrade Labeling Organization (FLO), the international fair trade labeling organization. While he argues that the split was necessary for expansion, some critics worry that scaling Fair Trade will dilute its impact. Rice is committed to expanding Fair Trade to impoverished laborers, whether or not they work on a cooperative through his “Fair Trade for All” platform. Early life and education Rice was raised in Dallas and Austin, Texas, the son of a single mother. He graduated from St. Mark's School of Texas. He was an entrepreneurial boy, selling newspapers, mowing lawns, and gardening in his community. By saving his earnings, Rice was able to self-finance most of his college tuition at Yale University, where he enrolled in 1978. At Yale, Rice studied Political Science and Economics, which sparked an interest in the issues of global hunger, poverty, and underdevelopment, particularly as they related to rural farming. At nineteen, he took a year off from school and went to China to learn about land reform and the peasants' struggle to organize cooperatives. This experience cemented his decision to enter the field of international development after graduating in 1983. Upon graduation, he spent over a decade working with agricultural farmers in Nicaragua, before returning to the US for a graduate degree. In 1990 Paul founded PRODECOOP, which became one of the largest organic coffee exporters in the world. After training the next CEO, Paul returned to the states in 1994, to