ENews 3/10/2009  Author: Melanie Marquez

(St. Petersburg, Fla.) March 10, 2009 - From meeting with a women's weaving cooperative to hiking Guatemalan coffee fields, a group of 19 MBA students will learn about business in Latin America during an immersive Spring Break experience.

Todd Shank, PhD, associate professor of finance, and Tom Ainscough, PhD, associate professor of marketing, leave Saturday, March 14, with the students for their first study abroad course in Guatemala.

Shank and Ainscough have led the popular Business in China summer course at the College of Business for five years. This course, their first in Latin America, is an examination of the Latin American business and economic environment with a focus on economic sustainability and the ways in which organizations simultaneously manage social and environmental concerns. Designed for MBA students, the course focuses on the business of fair trade and organic coffee. As a service learning course, the students will work in a coffee field for a day with a Guatemalan family.

"I think students will gain an opportunity to understand and appreciate the difficulties of life in a country that is near Florida and is traditionally considered a 'banana republic,' the specifics of how sustainable business practices impact the development of Guatemala and other Central American countries, how the concepts of fair trade and organic impact workers and the products they export, and what can be done to improve the future economic development in these countries," Shank said.

The nine-day itinerary includes visits to fair trade, organic coffee farms, a community library, a government organization that promotes Guatemalan coffee and a macadamia nut farm.

The focus of the course connects with the MBA program's theme of Corporate Social Responsibility and the program's ranking as #34 on the 2007-2008 Beyond Grey Pinstripes Global 100 list of programs that integrate social and environmental issues. Students will get to see and experience sustainability in an emerging market country first-hand. The students had two full days of lectures leading up to the trip covering business in Latin America, sustainability and economic development in Central America, the coffee industry in Central America and the history, people and politics of Guatemala.