Santiago Peralta: Just jump in and start the fight

Santiago Peralta's Pacari Chocolate has won a clutch of awards, while at the same time helping cocoa farmers in his native Ecuador.

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Santiago Peralta: a close relationship with 3,500 farmers

Santiago Peralta was born in Ecuador and moved to Portugal with his parents when he was a teenager. While studying law, he decided that what he really wanted to do was to set up a sustainable business. He therefore returned to his home country and set up Pacari Chocolate with Carla Barbot, now his wife. Santiago was an enthusiast of Ecuador's chocolate and felt it was not getting the global audience it deserved. He also felt that cocoa farmers were doing badly out of an arrangement that saw nearly all of the country's crop sold to one company.

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Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

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