Rice
"In the 1950s... you only needed to plot population growth against rice production to see that, within a few years, there would not be enough to go around. Something needed to be done, and in 1960 two American charities, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, joined forces to found the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. The new team began patiently cross-breeding the 10,000 different varieties they had collected.