Abstract: The exploration of adaptation and mitigation measures in the context of global challenges like climate change, food security and expected demographic boom is an field of research of growing importance. Over the last decades many research groups have been developing economic-trade models to analyse consequences on farm welfare, market supply and trade, some of them also address food security and other global concerns. There are many different ways to tackle these issues and the specific advantages and limitations of alternative modelling strategies are not yet well understood. The objective of the WP1 T1.1 task within TradeM theme of MACSUR is to use the results of a survey on trade and economic models of MACSUR Consortium partners to show which topics are currently addressed in the different models, which methods are used and how well these tools are prepared for an integration with other models like climate, crop and livestock models. This work was co-financed by NCBiR, Contract no. FACCE JPI/04/2012 – P100 PARTNER No Label

Abstract: Most people live in cities, but most food system studies and food security issues focus on the rural poor. Urban populations differ from rural populations in their food consumption by being generally wealthier, requiring food trade for their food security, defined as the extent to which people have adequate diets. Cities rarely have the self-provisioning capacity to satisfy their own food supply, understood as the extent to which the food consumed by the city’s population is produced from the city’s local agro-ecosystems. Almost inevitably, a city’s food security is augmented by production from remote landscapes, both internal and external in terms of a state’s jurisdiction. We reveal the internal and external food flows necessary for the food security of three wealthy capital cities (Canberra, Australia; Copenhagen, Denmark; Tokyo, Japan). These cities cover two orders of magnitude in population size and three orders of magnitude in population density. From traded volumes of food and their sources into the cities, we calculate the productivity of the city’s regional and non-regional ecosystems that provide food for these cities and estimate the overall utilised land area. The three cities exhibit differing degrees of food self provisioning capacity and exhibit large differences in the areas on which they depend to provide their food. We show that, since 1965, global land area effectively imported to produce food for these cities has increased with their expanding populations, with large reductions in the percentage of demand met by local agro-ecosystems. The physical trading of food commodities embodies ecosystem services, such as water, soil fertility and pollination that are required for land-based food production. This means that the trade in these embodied ecosystem services has become as important for food security as traditional economic mechanisms such as market access and trade. A future policy question, raised by our study, is the degree to which governments will remain committed to open food trade policies in the face of national political unrest caused by food shortages. Our study demonstrates the need to determine the food security and self-provisioning capacity of a wide range of rich and poor cities, taking into account the global location of the ecosystems that are provisioning them. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.