Paul Rice is the Founder of Fair Trade USA, the leading certifier of Fair Trade products in North America. Paul’s new book, Every Purchase Matters: How Fair Trade Farmers, Companies, and Consumers Are Changing the World, will be published by Public Affairs in April 2025. Since launching the Fair Trade Certified™ label in 1998, Paul has helped establish Fair Trade as one of the fastest-growing segments of the food and apparel industries. To date, Fair Trade USA has partnered with over 1,700 leading brands and retailers, including Green Mountain Coffee, Nespresso, Patagonia, Williams-Sonoma, J. Crew, Whole Foods, Costco, Sam's Club, Walmart, Kroger, and Target. Fair Trade USA now certifies coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, coconut, fresh produce, dairy, fish, apparel, home goods, beauty products, and more. Consumer awareness of the Fair Trade Certified label has grown to 65%. By 2024, the organization had generated $1.2 billion in cumulative financial impact for over 1.6 million farmers and workers in more than 72 countries worldwide.A pioneer in Conscious Capitalism, Rice is now a leading advocate of ethical sourcing as a strategy to improve lives, protect the planet, and promote sustainable business practices. Prior to Fair Trade USA, Rice worked with family farmers for eleven years in the mountains of Nicaragua, where he founded and led the country’s first Fair Trade coffee export cooperative, PRODECOOP. This unique, firsthand experience in the field inspired Rice to return to the United States with the dream of building the Fair Trade movement in this country.Rice has won numerous accolades for his accomplishments as a social entrepreneur. He was named Ethical Corporation’s 2019 Business Leader of the Year and has been recognized four times as Social Capitalist of the Year by Fast Company magazine. Rice also received the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, the World Economic Forum’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year, and the Ashoka Fellowship. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, Clinton Global Initiative, Skoll World Forum, Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit, TEDx, and numerous universities and conferences around the world.