Regional economic assessment of a novel place-based model for sustainable food systems

Several actions from both the environmental and human viewpoints have already been made to meet the sustainability goals targeted at food systems. Still, new place-based ideas to improve sustainability are needed. Agroecological symbiosis (AES), a novel food system model, is an example of a suggested system-level change to attain sustainability targets; it is a symbiosis of food production and processing using renewable energy that uses its own feedstock. AES has already been found advantageous from the ecological and biophysical viewpoints, but a regional economic evaluation of the model is still lacking. Thus, the aim of our paper is to assess the regional economic impact of a possible systemic change in the food system using the network of agroecological symbiosis (NAES) as an example. We applied scenarios representing different ways of moving towards envisioned NAES models in Mäntsälä, Finland, and a computable general equilibrium model to evaluate the regional economic impact. According to our results, both regional economy and employment would increase, and the regional production base would diversify with NAES implementation applied to the region, but the extent of the benefits varies between scenarios. The scenario that includes change in both public and private food demand, production of bioenergy and utilization of by-products would cause the largest impacts. However, realizing NAES requires investments that may influence the actual implementation of such models. Nonetheless, a change towards NAES can promote an economically and spatially just transition to sustainability, as NAES seems to be economically most beneficial for rural areas.