Well, it's been about 14 years since we began Precious Provisions Food Imports in the wake of 9/11.  Two weeks after my best friend from high school, Brian Scott, and I visited the World Trade Center as tourists in August 2001, it was destroyed, and perhaps many of the people we had seen working there during our brief visit had perished, also.

It was my thought then that inequalities in wealth and points of view had contributed to this unfortunate act, and that these inequalities could be addressed in at least some small way by setting up an importing company.  This company would import very fine goods from small concerns or individuals in developing companies and distribute them in developed countries, or among wealthier people, wherever they may live.  In return, the company would send hard currency to those skilled and hard-working individuals who had produced these goods to give those hard-working individuals money they needed to improve their lives, skills, and businesses.  And this, in turn, would reduce broad inequalities, and also provide purchasers of the fine goods experiences, perspectives, and ideas that they otherwise would not have had were it not for the skill and hard-work of the producers.

Not to digress too much, it was for these reasons that Precious Provisions then chose Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee as its first import.  JBM is known by many (as we would agree), to be the worlds finest coffee.  It is produced by sustainable, ecologically sound practices, mostly implemented by knowledgeable hands, that involve very little mechanized or industrialized processing, but rather experience, skill, patience, and fair trade practices.  Here are two different recent articles that I greatly admire on the topic of JBM as it is produced in Jamaica:

http://www.coffeedetective.com/why-blue-mountain-coffee-is-so-good.html

and

http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/coffee-tom-clynes-text

Enjoy!