The goal of the office was to ensure food security in Mexico and abroad through selective plant breeding and crop improvement.

Though its headquarters are in Mexico, the center operates through 12 regional offices (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe), as well as number of experimental stations.

Through CIMMYT's global breeding system and partner network, this genetic diversity is used to develop maize and wheat varieties that have higher yields,[19] and can survive climate stress and diseases.

[20] By CIMMYT's own accounts, the pedigrees of about half of the maize and wheat varieties sown in low- and middle-income countries carry contributions from its breeding research.

Borlaug's obituarist, Christopher Reed argued in an interview with The Guardian from 2014 that although his Green Revolution and high-yielding agricultural techniques averted poverty in the short term, in the long time they might have added to it.

[22] Nonetheless, in contrast to the preceding observations, which are sourced from the popular press, a widely-cited 2003 article in the peer-reviewed journal Science notes that "...it is unclear what alternative scenario would have allowed developing countries to meet, with lower environmental impact, the human needs posed by the massive population expansion of the 20th century.

One example is "StrigAway," a herbicide-coated maize seed variety that combats Striga, a parasitic weed that infests up to 50 million hectares of Sub-Saharan African land.