However, Rodd and the other British officials concerned thought that the Ethiopians would be slow to take advantage of what they had in effect already gained; it was considered that in practice things would continue much as they were with the Haud remaining as a sort of buffer zone used by the British clans only temporarily for grazing. The effects of the gradual adoption of agriculture by the western Somali clans were not envisaged, for this process had hardly yet started. A more serious objection which might more reasonably have been anticipated was the effect of the centuries’ old trend of population movement away from the highly eroded north towards the centre and Haud. This gradual drift of population was to bring increasing numbers of British protected Somali into what was now effectively the Ethiopian sphere.

I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Som…, loc. 189