Drawing on a wide range of sources, including informant testimonies, government and diplomatic archives and contemporary published account, the present article seeks to investigate the Ethiopian experience in international food exchange in the first half of the 20th century. Specifically, it sheds light on the primary causes of the internationalization of the country´s food market and the impact this has had on the important question of access to the valued agricultural resources at production sites. Its findings reveal how first the absence and then the slow growth of the food market within the country´s boundaries - most notably in the capital Addis Ababa - contributed to the globalization of the country´s food trade in the half century after its expansion in 1907. The paper demonstrates that the country´s experience in transnational food exchange was unprecedented and its growth and transformation was embedded in politics rather than the economics of supply and demand alone.