When TransFair CEO Paul Rice sits across from Wal-Mart (WMT) CEO H. Lee Scott, the differences in their backgrounds couldn't be more stark.
Scott has spent nearly his entire adult life working at the retail behemoth, with a mandate to increase sales and profits and keep costs as low as possible. Rice, after graduating from Yale University in 1983, spent 11 years working with peasant coffee farmers in Nicaragua trying to squeeze higher prices out of coffee buyers. He set up one of the first cooperatives, with 24 coffee-growing families, who sold their first batch of fair trade product to Europe in 1990 for $1.26 a pound, compared with the 10¢ a pound coffee was selling for in Nicaragua then. "It was an overnight legend in Nicaragua," recalls Rice...