Urban Foodprint and Mitigation Strategies : A Theoretical Analysis

Feeding the expanding global population while reducing the environmental impact of farming and food supply is among the main challenges of the century. Cities, which host the large majority of the past decade demographic growth, are at the forefront. They are increasingly considering the relevance of developing policies to explicitly support less-intensive production and/or rebuild their foodshed so as to reduce their reliance on long-distance food transport. In this paper, we develop a spatial theoretical model to describe and discuss both economic and environmental implications of farming practices change and relocation strategies. We highlight that, compared to the market outcome, promoting less-intensive and local farming may improve the welfare provided that the marginal opportunity cost of urban land remains low enough. However, we also show that the conversion from conventional to alternative farming does not necessarily reduce GHG emissions and may, as a consequence, offset the positive effect on welfare. We finally conduct numerical simulations so as to illustrate the ambiguous impacts of food relocation.