Letter from the outgoing ICC President - Prof. John Taylor

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

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