During her trip to Ethiopia (9 – 11 October 2019) federal minister of agriculture Julia Klöckner was accompanied by JKI president Prof. Frank Ordon. The German delegation visited a joint research project of the JKI-Institute for Resistance Research and Stress Tolerance in Quedlinburg and the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) in the city of Holeta. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) the project aims to identify genome regions and genes that induce tolerance to drought stress in old Ethiopian cultivars of barley and Durum wheat in order to hasten the breeding of new drought resistant cultivars. As part of the project two Ethiopian Ph.D. students are employed by the JKI in Quedlinburg and supervised by Prof. Ordon.
Among other things the delegation visited the trial fields for barley breeding at the Holeta Agricultural Research Center (HARC).