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The Highlands of Ethiopia is a memoir of Sir William Cornwallis Harris. In this book, he describes his journey as the first British Ambassador to the Christian Court of the Kingdom of Shoa in the highlands of Aethiopia, ruled at the time by Sahela Selassie. That mission paved the way for trade with this part of Africa and ultimately for the British colonization of large territories of Africa, including Sudan.

Agricultural GDP in Ethiopia grew at an average 7.3 percent per year between 2001/02 and 2012/13. Most of this dynamism occurred in the highlands, where high population density and land scarcity begs the question of how future agricultural output can be maintained to sustain the previous decade’s momentum. This paper uses a spatial regression approach to calculate the maximum crop area potential of each kebele in Ethiopia. We find that although the highlands have a greater potential for cropped area, there is little room to expand. A substantial share of the highlands has limited economic potential to expand the land base devoted to agriculture. In fact, many areas may be reaching an environmental threshold that will require the local agricultural land area to contract to maintain the agricultural productivity outcomes realized in previous years.