Feeding the cities and greenhouse gas emissions: a new economic geography approach

In this paper, we argue ’buying local’ does not necessarily reduces transport-related greenhouse gas emissions even if transport and production technologies, as well as natural endowment are homogeneous in space. We develop a model of rural-urban systems where the spatial distribution of food production within and between regions is endogenously determined. We exhibit cases where locating a significant share of the food production in the least-urbanized regions results in lower transport-related emissions than in configurations where all regions are self-sufficient (’pure local-food’). In addition, the optimal spatial allocation of food production does not exclude the possibility that some regions should rely solely on local production, provided their urban population sizes are neither too large nor too small.