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

Stéphane De Cara, Anne Fournier and Carl Gaigne

No 182678, 2014 International Congress, August 26-29, 2014, Ljubljana, Slovenia from European Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: ’Buying local food’ is sometimes advocated as a means of reducing the ’carbon footprint’ of food products. This statement overlooks the trade-off between inter- and intra-regional food transportation. We investigate this issue by using an m-region, new economic geography model. 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. The welfare-maximizing allocation of food production does not exclude the possibility that some regions should be self-sufficient, provided their urban population sizes are neither too large nor too small.

Keywords: Environmental; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13
Date: 2014-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene, nep-env, nep-geo and nep-ure
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https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/182678/files/D ... _emissions-464_a.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Feeding the Cities and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: A New Economic Geography Approach (2014)
Working Paper: Feeding the Cities and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: A New Economic Geography Approach (2014)
Working Paper: Feeding the cities and greenhouse gas emissions: a new economic geography approach (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:eaae14:182678

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.182678

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