On Oct. 28, the China International Food Safety & Quality Conference (CIFSQ) opens in Shanghai for its 20th year. It will honor Bill Marler as a Distinguished Contributor.
Marler is a food safety expert, Seattle food safety attorney and Publisher of Food Safety News.
Also being honored this year as Distinguished Contributors are Wu Yongning, chief scientist at the China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment (CFSA) and director of the National Health Commission’s Key Laboratory of Food Safety Risk Assessment; and Cindy Jiang, global food safety ambassador and the former senior director of global food safety at McDonald’s.
The ceremony also honors Ge Zhirong, the conference’s honorary chairman and a former deputy director of China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, and Chen Junshi, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chief advisor to CFSA, for distinguished leadership. The International Association for Food Protection is recognized as the conference’s distinguished global host. FDA, USDA, the European Food Safety Authority, Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the Shanghai JS Life Sciences Institute are named distinguished supporters.
How a lawyer from Seattle ended up at a food safety conference in Beijing
It started with pets, Marler said. During the 2007 melamine pet food recalls, someone told him about a new conference China’s quality and quarantine agency, AQSIQ, was launching in Beijing. He called the organizers. They offered him a keynote slot – if Marler Clark would become the Platinum sponsor. It did, and it kept doing so.
That September, at the first CIFSQ, Marler gave a keynote titled “The Legal Costs of Foodborne Illness.” A year later he was back in Beijing with “How US Consumers Hold Producers Accountable: A Civil Litigation Lesson in the US Market,” delivered just as the melamine-tainted infant formula scandal was exploding.
“I said then that Chinese food safety officials were doing exactly the right thing by inviting people from around the world to come and share what they knew. I still think so,” Marler said.
Marler sums up the importance of the conference to people in the United States with one simple statement:
“Food does not stay home. An ingredient that leaves a plant in one country can make people sick in another before anyone has a name for it, and the regulators, scientists and companies who have to find it rarely sit in the same room. For twenty years, CIFSQ has put them there.”
