Food Protection Trends - January/February 2023 - 106

COMMENTARY (Continued from page 6)
FROM YOUR PRESIDENT | Michelle D. Danyluk
Next, David and I continued to Santiago, Chile, for the 13th Anniversary
of the bi-annual INOFOOD meeting. It's a leading food safety
meeting in Chile and includes an expo, posters, technical talks, and
parallel symposia. This is a great partnership for IAFP and generates
a lot of local engagement. Held for the first time in person since 2017,
this meeting was so popular they had to close registration because
they were at capacity at the venue! Lidia Vidal, the director of the
organization, and the team at Eurofins need to be congratulated on
this event - another meeting I'd encourage you to attend in the future.
The IAFP Affiliates are doing amazing work taking the message
of Food Protection into their communities. If you are not a member
of an affiliate, join one; if there is no affiliate in your area, help build
one. Too many of us associate IAFP with the Annual Meeting; it
truly is at these local events where the impact is proliferated to so
many in their communities. The students I met at these meetings
show me the future of our association is bright - with enthusiasm
around the world to keep our food supply safe.
The call for nominations for IAFP awards is out, and I've seen
over these past two months that we have so many members around
the world very deserving of recognition. I challenge all of you to
nominate your deserving colleagues for IAFP awards. Don't be
discouraged if your nominations aren't selected right away. Award
winners have often been nominated over multiple years, so continue
to fine tune and resubmit the nominations.
There are so many things happening that I couldn't touch on
this time - like the gargantuan tasks of the Annual Meeting and
European Symposium Program Committees reviewing a record
number of session proposals, JFP's transition to open access, the
next steps in finding a new Executive Director, and a new way to
volunteer to be more involved in IAFP - I promise I'll get to those
next time.
For now, I'll leave you, as we enter 2023, with the knowledge
that although change is coming to IAFP, there's excitement and
opportunity for growth to continue this organization's mission to
promote Food Protection Worldwide.
FROM YOUR EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR | David W. Tharp
2008), we were invited to Dubai to attend the Dubai International
Food Safety Conference. This began our working relationship with
the Dubai Municipality and the conference that continues to today.
Both conferences offered IAFP opportunities that we may not have
pursued on our own. But working together, we have been able to
help these conferences while exposing new audiences to IAFP.
Another conference that we have worked together with is
INOFOOD that was held last November in Santiago, Chile. This
is a conference held every other year that attracts a great following
in Latin America. IAFP has participated regularly since 2013.
In 2008, we began the Latin America Symposium on Food Safety
with the first conference being organized by the Brazilian Affiliate.
The most recent version was completed in November in Medellin,
Colombia and was organized by the Colombian Affiliate.
Shortly thereafter in 2009, our first Asia Pacific Symposium on
Food Safety was held in Seoul, South Korea and was organized by our
Korean Affiliate. From this summary, you can see that IAFP is now
an " International " association and actively supports conferences
around the world. In 17 short years, the expansion of activities for
IAFP is truly incredible!
Other efforts that come to mind as being important over the
years include: reducing Membership fees to an affordable amount
for anyone having to pay from their own resources; implementing
a tiered-level Sustaining Member program to provide support to
the Association and to speakers in need of travel support; always
updating and changing our two journals - the Journal of Food Protection
and Food Protection Trends to keep them current; establishing
Memoranda of Understandings (MOUs) with the Institute for
the Advancement of Food and Nutrition Sciences (IAFNS), the
International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for
Foods (ICMSF) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations (FAO). Each of these efforts have helped IAFP to
grow over the years.
I should mention, as Michelle did in her column, that the Journal
of Food Protection is now an Open Access journal. This has been a
long process and as of January 2023, research articles are available,
free of charge, to everyone around the world. Please help spread the
word.
In the beginning of this column, I mentioned the financial challenge
we faced back in 1993. I'm proud to report that at the end of
August 2021 we held almost $3.4 million in reserves. In addition,
the IAFP Foundation held another $3 million in its reserves.
Unfortunately, between COVID, losses in our investments and
additional expenses related to IAFP 2022, the year ending August 31,
2022 showed a loss of $1.4 million in general operations leaving
our reserves just short of $2 million. The Foundation now holds
$2.6 million in reserves. This is still a very stable base for IAFP
operations and one that can be built upon moving forward. The
financial results for our fiscal year ending August 31, 2022 are
shown on page 107.
So, I used this month's column to recap a little of IAFP's history
from the past 30 years. As I stated in the beginning, it has been an
honor and a pleasure to have had this opportunity to lead IAFP
over this period. I can't think of anything I would have rather done in
my lifetime. My wife, Connie, and I have met so many wonderful people
in our travels to a multitude of meetings! We will always have fantastic
memories to enjoy in retirement. We wish you the very best as you
continue your food safety journey and hope that IAFP's mission will
live on and on - " to provide food safety professionals worldwide with
a forum to exchange information on protecting the food supply. "
106 Food Protection Trends January/February
Food Protection Trends - January/February 2023

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