Feeding the Cities and Greenhouse Gas Emissions - Beyond the Food Miles Approach

Stéphane De Cara, Anne Fournier and Carl Gaigne

No 114350, 2011 International Congress, August 30-September 2, 2011, Zurich, Switzerland from European Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: In this paper, we study the impact of urbanization on the location of agricultural production and the GHG emissions related to transportation activities. We develop an economic geography model where the location of agricultural activities and urban population are endogenous. We show that increasing agricultural yields induce the spatial concentration of agricultural production in the least urbanized region if agricultural transport costs are relatively low and in the most urbanized region otherwise. In addition, interregional trade in agricultural commodities is desirable to reduce GHG emissions, except when urban population is equally split between cities. However, the market may induce too much agglomeration of agricultural production when yields are high and when collection costs are low.

Keywords: Environmental Economics and Policy; Food Security and Poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 12
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/114350/files/Fournier_Anne_249.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:eaae11:114350

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.114350

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2011 International Congress, August 30-September 2, 2011, Zurich, Switzerland from European Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().