Green Business: From the West Bank, Fair-Trade Olives

Nasser Abufarha was sipping coffee at a Madison (Wis.) café called Michelangelo's a few years back when it dawned on him how he might help struggling olive growers in his native Palestine. If the crowd could derive virtuous pleasure from mugs of "fair trade" organic coffee, they might be convinced of the superiority of organic oil pressed from West Bank olives.

Abufarha, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, wrapped up his dissertation on suicide bombers and headed home to the West Bank. The olive farming industry there was in a shambles. Yields were low due to poor soil treatment, and farmers were barely breaking even—leading many to abandon their fields and migrate to Palestinian cities, where unemployment hovered around 40 percent.