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.
Data on the webs, prey spectrum, density and fecundity of Theridion impressum from three different habitats [fields of sunflower, fiddleneck (Phacelia), and apple trees] are presented and discussed. The volume of webs were found to vary between 5 (the first free instar) to 117 cm3 (subadult and adult specimens). The mean density of adult spiders per plant was 0.7 (sunflower), 1.5 (fiddleneck) and 1.2 (per apple branch). Spiders preferred to build webs in the upper part of vegetation or at the extremities of tree branches. The prey spectrum was assessed by collecting webs and identifying their contents. Prey items were primarily aphids (73%), Diptera (7.5%), acid Coleoptera and Hymenoptera (both 5.4%). Pests comprised 90% of the prey; the remaining 10% was accounted for by natural enemies, pollinators and other insects. The number of insects captured in webs differed among study habitats (sunflower > fiddleneck > apple tree) though this difference was not statistically significant. Due to greater numbers of aphids in webs on sunflower, the mean prey length was significantly smaller on sunflowers than in other plots. An index of fecundity was obtained by counting the number of eggs in eggsacs. This varied from 48 to 156 per eggsac and was not significantly different between study plots. The number of eggs was strongly correlated with numbers of prey captured per spider.