FIATA holds annual general meeting

The FIATA General Meeting was held virtually on 7 December due to the pandemic. The General Meeting, which would normally take place during the annual FIATA World Congress, was attended by almost 200 participants. The General Meeting closes a year where more than 100 other FIATA bodies meetings have taken place online, proof of FIATA’s digital connectivity with its members.

The General Meeting approved reports from the Presidency on 2019 activities and financial matters, including the adoption of the budget for 2021. Two new Association Members were welcomed by the General Meeting, the Turkmen Logistics Association and Transport and Logistic Federation of Iran – bringing the total number of Association Members to 109 and reinforcing FIATA’s membership value even in these unprecedented times. A net increase of 115 Individual Members was also noted at year end.

The General Meeting also elected Stephen McDermott from the Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association (CIFFA) as the new chair of the FIATA Logistics Institute, and Niels Beuck from Bundesverband Spedition und Logistik (DSLV) as the new chair of the Advisory Body on Safety and Security. Both new chairs bring recognized expertise in their respective fields and will further leverage the work of FIATA.

A keynote address was given by Adam Roark, WW Transportation/Logistics BD at Amazon Web Services, where he discussed topics impacting the supply chain today such as streamlining data and enabling digitalization.

Other topics, such as e-commerce, autonomous solutions, resiliency, disruption management, were raised throughout the address. It confirmed the relevancy of the FIATA Digital Strategy elaborated by FIATA in Spring 2020.

“Although we would have preferred to greet our community of freight forwarders face to face, we had to adapt this year given the exceptional circumstances,” said Basil Pietersen, FIATA President. “We had an extremely positive digital meeting that allowed the participation of so many of our members from around the world. It’s been a challenging year, but we have also accomplished so much at FIATA through the implementation of our reset programme. The setting of our annual meeting was certainly different, but so was the tone as we start to see the fruit of our hard work with the organizational restructuring.”