United Fresh Senior Vice President Dr. David Gombas was among the featured presenters at this year’s GlobalGAP conference on good agricultural practices in Cologne, Germany. GlobalGAP is a benchmarking organization for "before-the-farm-gate" audit programs in 80 countries, representing over 90,000 audits in 2008 alone. The conference drew more than 400 suppliers, auditors and buyers from around the world, and attendees participated in a number of roundtable and panel discussions to review and comment on benchmarking parameters. Topics included auditor competence, food safety and non-food safety recommendations, overcoming obstacles to audits harmonization, and the coordination of audits between GlobalGAP and "after-the-farm-gate" audit programs like BRC and IFS. In his presentation entitled Managing Food Safety Risks in Produce, David told the audience "Produce standards must be consistent, involving the needs and perspectives of the entire produce supply chain, but remain flexible to differences important to specific commodities and regions, and they must be based on science, not speculation. Further, any assessment of compliance to produce standards will only be as good as the training and competence of the auditor performing the assessment. Programs must be in place and openly transparent to assure that auditors are calibrated in their interpretation of produce standards and accurate in their assessment of risks in the operations they audit."