The 14^th ICC Cereal and Bread Congress 2012 "Science and Technology Innovation for Healthy Cereals & Oils" will take place in Beijing, China, 6-9 August 2012. Cereals and oils are the basic foods for people around the globe. Relevant research and innovation is a matter of consistent concern.

The 14^th ICC Cereal and Bread Congress will provide a unique opportunity to meet and exchange new ideas and valuable information with the global science and research community, and technology, processing and trading professionals in the cereal and grain, oil and food fields worldwide.

Topics will include:

Cereal Storage - Fumigation and pest control - Cereal Processing - Novel cereals products - Improvement on food additives - Oil and Fat Industry - Biotechnology on oil seeds and oil & fat - Eastern and Western Staple Food - Food Safety and Quality - Safety evaluation on GMO food - Cereal Food Nutrition and Health - Dietary fiber and whole grain food - Ingredients of bioactive components - Technologies on rice and flour fortification - Global Food Security and Sustainable development - Energy saving and emission reduction of cereal and oil industry.

Mark Your Calendar! Continuing the successful series of MoniQA International Conferences (Rome, Italy, 2008; Krakow, Poland, 2010; Varna, Bulgaria, 2011), targeting participants from regulatory, industry, research and technology, method providers, media and consumer associations, the 4th MoniQA International Conference will be taking place in Budapest, Hungary, 26 February - 1 March 2013, conveniently scheduled just prior to the IAM ( Inter-Agency-Meeting) and Codex Alimentarius CCMAS 2013! Please mark your calendar now, and contact us, if you are interested to be involved in the organization of specific sessions related to "Food Safety: driven by Globalisation, Climate Change, Food Security and Economic Crises". Contact: roland [dot] poms [AT] icc [dot] or [dot] at or tomoskozi [AT] mail [dot] bme [dot] hu.

The 3^rd International Symposium on Gluten-Free Cereal Products and Beverages is organised by the Department of Food Sciences and Technology (DFST), University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna, Austria in partnership with the International Association for Cereal Science and Technology (ICC)), to be held in Vienna, Austria, 12-14 June 2013.

This symposium will be a three day event, and will span the whole food supply chain from agricultural over analytical and processing to consumer and industrial aspects. It addresses international scientists and technologists, specialists from coeliac societies, health professionals, physicians, breeders, millers, bakers, food processors, suppliers and traders to discuss relevant aspects of gluten free cereal products and beverages, and the significance of minor cereals.

(Vienna, 31 January 2011) Quality Assurance and Safety of Crops & Foods (QAS), the official Journal of ICC and MoniQA, has been selected for coverage in Thomson Reuters products and services. The journal will be indexed and abstracted in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SciSearch), the Journal Citation Reports (Science Edition) and Current Contents ® and will receive an impact factor in the course of this process. Coverage will start with volume 1 (2009).

QAS is an international journal publishing peer-reviewed scientific research papers and review papers in the areas of cereals, grain crops, their quality and issues relating to food safety. The relatively young journal has reached wide acknowledgement for providing peer-reviewed information and research results in the area of food safety and quality assessment. QAS is published by Wiley-Blackwell with Stanley Cauvain and Roland Poms as the Joint Editors in Chief.

MoniQA (Monitoring and Quality Assurance in the total food supply chain, www.moniqa.org) is an EU-funded project which involves experts from around the globe working for safer foods by harmonising worldwide food quality and safety monitoring and control strategies. QAS is a major dissemination channel for MoniQA relevant research papers and related issues and MoniQA results such as validation studies, surveys, harmonised protocols and identified gaps and challenges in food safety management and analysis.

ICC National Delegates are invited to nominate technical experts from their country to serve on ICC’s new enlarged Technical Committee, which is tasked with updating and expanding the ICC Standards. The persons concerned should be active in cereal analysis and have both a good technical and academic background in cereal science and technology, they are expected to serve as member of at least one ICC Working Group working on a specific Standard and possibly act as chair or deputy chair of that Working Group. The new Technical Committee will mostly meet via e-mail or teleconference and there will be a once every year face to face meeting. An ICC priority is to update and expand the ICC Standard Methods so that they will be of even greater use to the cereals community worldwide.

Dear National Delegates, Dear Institutional Members Representatives, Dear Corporate Members Representatives, Dear ICC Academy Members, Dear Secretary General, Dear Acting Deputy Secretary General, Dear ICC Team in Vienna,

it is now my turn to be ICC President.

I feel very honoured and thrilled at the start of my mandate.

I believe in cereals.

They are part of my every day life, as, I imagine, for most, if not all, of you. In the country where I come from, Italy, we eat cereals at breakfast, lunch and dinner and, moreover, I deal with cereals at work!

What I really like about cereals is the idea that everywhere in the world, from the Northern to the Southern hemisphere, from East to West, they are at the base of the daily diet of all human populations. Cereals are truly global.

This also means that they carry many values: genetical, agricultural, commercial, nutritional, and cultural values. So, the protection of cereals and their values is a great opportunity to try and improve the actual quality of life worldwide.

How can this be achieved? There are, in my view, several ways and they can all take advantage of the existence of ICC, this great international organization which, at present, brings together representatives of many countries worldwide.

The following objectives can therefore be pursued by means of ICC:

• to organize scientific events and activities aimed at spreading the culture of quality “from farm to fork” in the interest of all the cereal food chain actors, i.e. breeders, growers, dealers, products manufacturers, equipment manufacturers and most of all consumers;
• to study production and processing systems which are driven by the concept of sustainability
• to exploit the key role of ICC as publisher of international standard methods to establish common standards of different levels of complexity to cater for the different needs of different countries which might have different levels of development;
• to favour and encourage the application of hi-tech science for the development of simple, rapid, easy to use kits that can be applied widely for the screening of quality parameters and the improvement of the cereal sectors also in developing countries.

It will be easier to reach the above mentioned objectives if the following actions are also taken:

• to improve and find ways to encourage participation of more countries to ICC for an effective exchange of knowledge and for cross pollination between different knowledge levels and cultures;
• to pay more attention to cereals other than wheat;
• to promote integration between all actors of the cereal food chain;
• to multiply initiatives aimed at spreading knowledge of the existence of the Association itself and its missions also within member countries along with initiatives aimed at encouraging corporate members’ and young scientists’ participation;
• to reinforce and possibly enhance ICC influence and authoritativeness upon decision making or consultative bodies at the multinational level (i.e. European Food Safety Authority, FAO, etc.);
• to strengthen scientific and technical cooperation with international or national organizations working in the same or related fields as ICC (AACC, AOAC, ISO, UNIDO, etc.).

Having served as National Delegate for Italy and as Member of the Technical and Executive Committees for several years, I got to know ICC and his community and, for this reason, I am looking at the future with confidence and enthusiasm because I trust that I shall have the opportunity to preside a group of competent, fair, supportive and committed people.

In this regard I wish to thank my near Predecessors as ICC President, in particular John Taylor, Concha Collar and Stan Cauvain whom I got to know better and who have given a lot of their time and efforts for the well-being of the Association. They are a great example for me to follow!

Special thanks also go to our Secretary General, Roland Poms, who has always tried and exploited new opportunities for ICC growth and visibility, to our new Acting Deputy Secretary General, who is performing really well and to all the great ICC team at the Head Office in Vienna.

ICC needs the help, support, ideas of all its Members to grow and thrive in the age of globalisation. Therefore I encourage all of you to consider yourselves as active members of the ICC family and to feel free to let ICC know about your opinions, initiatives, experiences, wishes and anything you deem useful for the ICC furtherance.

I shall always be pleased to hear from you and I look forward to working with you all.

Marina Carcea

Rome, Italy
January 2011

Dear Members of the ICC Family,

it has been my great honour to serve you as ICC President for the past two years. This has been a very exciting and rewarding period for our Association and for me personally. There have been very many highlights, including:

• The launch of our own scientific journal “Quality Assurance and Safety of Crops and Foods,” QAS for short, which is being very ably edited by Stan Cauvain and Roland Poms.
• ICC’s coordination of the EU MoniQA (Monitoring and Quality Assurance in the Food Supply Chain) Network of Excellence, the outcomes of which are being published in QAS.
• ICC’s participation in the EU Healthgrain Project on the science and technology of health-promoting components in whole grain cereals, and in its successor, the Healthgrain Forum.
• ICC’s participation in the EU PlantLIBRA Project, which is fostering the safe use of food supplements containing plant or botanical preparations, by improving science-based decision-making.
• The coordination by ICC of several major scientific conferences, including the Dietary Fibre DF09 Conference in Vienna in 2009, and the Healthgrain Conference in Lund in 2010.
• ICC’s hosting of a Summit on Staple Food Security, and our Association’s declaration on Food Security, whereby ICC has committed itself to using our expertise to help eliminate global grain food insecurity.
• The introduction of greatly improved ICC member benefits for Country and Corporate members, and the introduction of the category of Institutional Membership.

None of these would have been possible without the great ICC team, especially at the Head Office in Vienna, in particular our highly energetic Secretary General, Roland Poms and Marcella Gross, our very capable Acting Deputy Secretary General.

During the past two years it has also been my great privilege to visit with ICC associations across the world, including China, Sudan and Taiwan. I wish like to thank these local associations for their wonderful hospitality. It was also my personal privilege to welcome many of you to my home country of South Africa in February this year at our local CST-SA – ICC Grains Symposium in Pretoria, and again in August at the IUFoST Congress in Cape Town.

I would also like to especially thank my predecessors as ICC President, Concha Collar and Stan Cauvain, who voluntarily took on far more tasks than they should have, greatly easing my load.

It is with every confidence that I hand over the Presidency to my successor, Dr Marina Carcea, Italy’s National Delegate. Marina is a wonderful person and a great scientist. She will bring considerable innovation and flair to our Association. This year 2010, you also voted Dr Joel Abecassis, France’s National Delegate as incoming President-elect and Dr Fengcheng Wang, China’s Deputy National Delegate, to follow him. This is an outstanding team and the future of ICC is in very good hands indeed.

Thank you
John Taylor

Pretoria, South Africa
December 2010

Joel Abecassis from INRA, France, was elected ICC President Elect by the ICC National Delegates, and the Representatives of the ICC Regions and ICC Corporate Members unanimously. Joel Abecassis will start his term as ICC President Elect on 1 January 2011 and will succeed Marina Carcea from INRAN, Italy, as ICC President in 2013. The new President-Elect will be finally appointed at the ICC General Assembly, which will take place during the II Latino-American ICC Conference in Santiago di Chile in April 2011.

Fengcheng Wang from Henan University of Technology, China, was elected to succeed Joel Abecassis as ICC President Elect. In a dual election for two successive terms for ICC Presidency both Joel Abecassis, France, and Fengcheng Wang, China, were elected by the ICC National Delegates, and the Representatives of the ICC Regions and ICC Corporate Members unanimously. Fengcheng Wang will start his term as President Elect on 1 January 2013 and will succeed Joel Abecassis as ICC President in 2015.