KUALA LUMPUR (October 8, 2017) – The extended board of the International Federation of Freight Forwarders Associations has elected Babar Badat [second from right in photo] as its new president for the next two-year term.

Badat is managing director of Transfreight Corporation (Pvt) Ltd. in Pakistan and was elected as senior vice president of FIATA in 2015.

“We are living through very tough times where the economy is changing very fast,” he said, speaking after his election at the end of the FIATA World Congress 2017 in Kuala Lumpur. “The Millennium Development Goals were launched by the United Nations in 2000 and finished in 2015, and in 2015 the Sustainable Development Goals were launched. Whereas logistics was absent from the Millennium Development Goals, it is at the centre of the new initiative. With that, you see a lot of emphasis on global connectivity.”

He added that, with the depleted infrastructure in many parts of the world, it was realized a few years ago that one of the biggest barriers to the growth of global trade was a lack of logistics connectivity.

“Therefore, everybody has started invested or looking at investing into infrastructure,” Badat said. “We at FIATA are obviously cognizant of that and we position ourselves to go along with that. We’ve done a lot of work and I hope to continue this work so that we can collectively come up with some more initiatives.”

Zhao Huxiang [right in photo], outgoing president of FIATA, said that he was proud of what the federation had achieved during the past two years.

“Apart from our influence in the world, we’ve done a lot of internal innovation, like our e-training and our agreement with IATA for the IATA-FIATA Air Cargo Program,” he said. “All this is because we have a good team, and in the next two years this will continue. With our e-learning and training, I think we have a very good plan for the next two or three years.”

The federation also announced that the World Congress 2020 would be held in Busan, South Korea.

The two other candidate cities were Brussels and Dubai.

FIATA's World Congress 2018 and World Congress 2019 will be held in New Delhi and Cape Town respectively.