From September 30 to October 6, the 2019 FIATA Annual Conference was held in Cape Town, South Africa. The conference attracted more than 800 delegates from more than 100 countries and regions around the world and passed many important issues. Zhao Huxiang, president of China International Freight Forwarding Association, led a delegation to attend the annual meeting.

This year is FIATA's general election year. Nominated by the Bureau and reviewed by the General Assembly, Basil Pietersen from South Africa was successfully elected as the new chairman of FIATA. In view of China's international status and Chairman Zhao Huxiang's contribution to FIATA, the General Assembly elected him to continue to serve as the treasurer of FIATA's new presidium and to be responsible for the FIATA Foundation. His term of office will be until 2021. Yang Yuntao, the director of the Legal Work Committee of our association and the deputy director of the transportation and logistics business department of China Merchants, was elected as the chairman of the Advisory Body Legal Matters.

The General Assembly considered and approved the proposal of the Bureau to relocate the FIATA Secretariat from Zurich, Switzerland to Geneva. The relocation is expected to start gradually in 2020. Geneva is the headquarters of more than 100 international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the World Economic Forum. The relocation of FIATA headquarters here not only hopes to strengthen the communication and collaboration between FIATA and these international organizations, but also helps the Secretariat to recruit international talents.

Members of the General Assembly also reviewed and approved the proposal of the Bureau to merge the two major vocational training committees within FIATA. The new organization will integrate the personnel and related work of the existing vocational training advisory committee and FIATA Logistics Academy (FLA), and uniformly coordinate FIATA online and offline training projects. In recent years, FIATA vocational training has achieved outstanding results. Up to now, a total of 15075 people have obtained FIATA training certificates. Among them, 836 people in mainland China rank third in the world. If 582 people in Taiwan, China ranks second in the world, second only to France. The ICAO-FIATA air cargo dangerous goods training project undertaken by our association in Mainland China has achieved remarkable results and was praised by the conference.

The conference also announced the results of the 2019 FIATA Young Freight Forwarding Contest. FIATA and TT CLUB jointly awarded the championship of the contest to Ms. Cvgeniya of Russia. The winners in the Asia-Pacific region were won by New Zealand players. The players selected by our association won the participation certificate.

In order to promote the further development of China-Europe trains and solve the problem of property rights of railway waybills, the Ministry of Commerce’s Department of Laws and Regulations took the lead in organizing a study on the financing transport documents applicable to China-Europe trains and submitted relevant proposals to the United Nations Law Commission (UNCITRAL). The Ministry of Commerce is cooperating with FIATA to promote this work. Use FIATA's existing freight forwarding multimodal bill of lading (FBL) with railway waybills, that is, the freight forwarder as a multimodal transport carrier issues a multimodal bill of lading to the customer, and the railway company as the railway carrier uses the freight forwarding company as the receipt /The shipper issues the rail waybill, so that the property rights of the multimodal bill of lading can be directly used for trade financing without changing the international rules of the existing rail transport document. It is a simple and feasible plan proposed by FIATA for this purpose. UNCITRAL, in consultation with the Ministry of Commerce's Law and Regulation Department, plans to hold a project seminar in Chongqing in mid-December this year. More than 40 experts at home and abroad will be invited to attend the meeting.

China International Freight Forwarders Association

October 11, 2019