Annual Meeting Reprt -- 2015
2015 CAFPNA and CAFP Joined Annual Meeting Report
9/7/2015
By Ruiqing Pamboukian (Ph.D.) President of CAFPNA (2014-2015)
The joint annual meeting of Chinese Association for food Protection (CAP) and Chinese Association for Food Protection in North America (CAFPNA) took place July 26, 2015, in Portland, Oregon, during IAFP’s 2015 annual meeting. More than 60 members from North America and China attended the meeting. Most of the attendees represented academia; industry and government include many students as well.
Dr. Ruiqing Pamboukian, president of CAFPNA and Dr. Xiumei Liu, president of CAFP welcomed the attendees followed by the featured presentation by Dr. Liu entitled - The Progress of China Food Safety Law and Food Safety Standards. In her presentation, Dr. Liu summarized the progress China made in food safety during the recent years. Although the situation of food safety has been getting improved, we are still facing many challenges in different areas. For example, food producers still need to be trained for their responsibilities. Government has strengthened risk monitoring, but supervision system needs to be improved on the risk based. Other areas include food safety risk communication and public education need to be strengthened as well.
The IAFP Executive Director, Mr. David Tharp gave a brief welcome remark on behalf of IAFP. He informed our members about the global growth of IAFP, and appreciated what we had done in the past year. He encouraged every member to continue to make progress towards professional development and join IAFP’s programs, especially the program with China food safety.
Dr. Ruiqing Pamboukian, the current president of CAFPNA, congratulated the growth of our affiliation with current 198 members by this year and thanked the support of all the board members and members throughout the year. She reported to the members on CAFPNA activities carried out in the past year including the successful educational webinars organized offered to the CAFPNA and the facilitation roles to organize and host the symposium in the China International Food Safety & Quality Conference & Expo 2014. Mentor-mentee and student committee Chairs Zengxin Li and Yue Cui reported the activities and successful stories on the mentor-mentee program progress and some challenges faced. The purpose of the mentor-mentee program is to provide insight and guidance on career planning/development and build connection and strengthen professional relationship by sharing the best practices and experiences among professionals and students. Since the implementation of this program positive feedbacks were received but the participation was relatively low. We hope more members will participate in this program in the future so more and more students or other members need career planning/development advices can be benefited and best practices will be efficiently shared among the members. Advices and assistance for student’s future career development was also discussed by the members.
Dr. Xianming Shi from CAFP addressed the activities he participated in the last year and the events he plans for the next year. He is one of the government appointed Food Safety experts and has visited several countries to learn food safety management systems. Dr. Shi has also addressed the demand from the students in China of getting more information about study aboard and establishing mentor-mentee relationships with food safety professionals in the U.S.
An election for the new board member (secretary position) was actively conducted. The current board members as follows after the election:
President: Zachary(Zuoxing) Zheng
President Elect: Xiuping Jiang
Past President: Ruiqing Pamboukian
Secretary: Luxin Wang
Treasurer: Wen Zou
Delegate: Ruiqing Pamboukian
Lastly, led by the incoming President Zachary Zheng all the members had a very active discussion on the plans of activities for the year of 2016. Some of the future activities include continue improvement of the affiliate website, continue using webinars as the tool to connect members and provide educational opportunities, work closely with CAFP to improve communication and enhance collaboration between CAFPNA and CAFP in the future.
The meeting was concluded by warm hugs and saying “See you next year!” We are looking forward to having a productive year ahead.
