An hour outside of Mexico City, the taxi turns off the main road, and the noise and bustle of the highway fade away. Past a steel gate and a white guardhouse, we enter the well-tended grounds of the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat, known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT (pronounced SIM-it). It's a farm masquerading as a small United Nations. An array of flags pays tribute to the countries that fund the organization's work: creating better crops for the developing world's poor farmers.

Further ahead is a line of white signs, each standing in front of a small square plot where hairy heads of wheat sway in the breeze. This is agriculture's Walk of Fame; on those signs are the names of wheat varieties that emerged from CIMMYT's breeding grounds four decades ago: Sonora, Yaqui, Kauz, Sujata, Sonalika, and others. These varieties, which resist disease and produce unprecedented yields, conquered Asia, displacing traditional wheat varieties and older methods of farming. The stars of the Green Revolution, the new varieties unleashed a phenomenal rise in grain production that allowed China and India to feed themselves. Indeed, the impact of the new grains was so great that they earned Norman Borlaug, the original director of CIMMYT's wheat program, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.