Jimmy Smith

Jimmy Smith is a Guyanese animal scientist who served as Director General of the International Livestock Research Institute, ILRI, for eleven years until his retirement at the end of 2022. Born to cattle raising parents in Guyana and trained at Tuskegee Institute before earning a master's degree and a doctorate in animal science from the University of Illinois in 1986, he held senior positions at the Caribbean Agriculture Research and Development Institute, the Canadian International Development Agency, the World Bank and CGIAR before taking the ILRI directorship. Under his leadership the institute more than doubled in size and expanded its research into livestock's connections to human health, nutrition, gender equity and environmental sustainability, and he became known for arguing that assessments of livestock's costs and benefits depend heavily on the perspective and circumstances of whoever is doing the assessing.