DAVIDE SIGNA

Davide Signa, Italian, 45 years old, is an Italian freelance consultant specialized in food waste and food loss reduction. He works as a consultant expert on food security and food losses for various institutions and international companies such as the World Bank and the Swiss multinational Vestergaard Frandsen.

Davide has been a food waste activist since he was a university student when he initiated a group of students to be responsible for the recuperation of leftovers from the faculty cafeteria for homeless people in his hometown Palermo in Italy. 

He holds two advanced degrees with distinction in Agriculture Sciences and Technology (1999) from the University of Palermo and in Tropical and Subtropical Agricultural Sciences (2003) from The University of Florence. 

He started his professional career with international NGOs from 1999 to 2004, after which he joined the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) with whom he worked until 2014. He has been working in close collaboration with a broad set of institutional and implementing partners including the private sector, NGOs, regional economic communities (RECs), regional fisheries bodies (RFB), government departments, and other UN agencies in order to contribute to the decision-making processes related to the reduction of post-harvest losses at the national and regional level. 

For example, the activities he coordinated in strong collaboration with the private sector on the mud crab industry in Madagascar improved significantly the value chain performance reducing in the target areas the losses occurred due to crab mortality from 27% to 15%. 

He has worked as a project manager for several projects in a total of 11 countries across Africa, Asia, Central, and South America in the fields of agriculture and fisheries. In his work, he has been involved in several activities related to value chain efficiency and food waste and losses for different commodities from grains and horticultural to fisheries products and more recently with a particular focus on fish and fish products. 

He currently resides in Palermo-Sicily (Italy) after eight years in Mauritius with the COI (Commission de l’ Ocean Indien) He founded and directed the Manzer Partazer initiative which is the first direct food sharing initiative in all Africa