News photo
Active duty: Young Nic (right) on patrol while serving as a Game Warden in the Simien Mountains of northern Ethiopia in the late 1960s. The man on the left, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, was Assistant Warden Mesfin Abebe, and the two men behind were local vigilantes who joined us in pursuit of illegal loggers. C.W. NICOL PHOTOS
OLD NIC S NOTEBOOK
Reflections on feelings and farmland born of an exciting time spent serving Haile Selassie
By C.W. NICOL
On March 15 just gone, this newspaper carried an excellent but disturbing article by John Vidal, environment editor of the London-based Guardian newspaper. He wrote about food shortages and land-grabbing in Africa, and I was particularly troubled to read about deals going on to sell Ethiopian land to foreign investors. In the article, an Ethiopian government spokesperson was quoted as saying that Ethiopia has 74 million hectares of fertile land, of which only 15 percent is currently in use mainly by subsistence