Unless that is you simply mean local in the sense more stuff from within a few hundred kilometers and less stuff coming in from halfway across the world. If so I agree, at least in areas that have plenty of suitable land nearby. For places like the US southwest where that isn't the case you'll actually see less of that sort of 'local', though what agriculture there is in such areas will be more oriented towards the local market rather than commodity production as it is now.
In the second sense (your paragraph 2), I'd use "regional" rather than local. But yes, I am against consecrating certain regions of the world "food-producing" and shipping food across the planet. To feed the world, I think we should be producing food everywhere, and aiming at reducing transport.
You are looking at one dimension of the problem, density per square kilometer at the level of a country/district ...
... but sprawl is not simply having people live outside a densely urbanized large metropolis.
Its having them live outside of a densely urbanized large metropolis, at low densities per hectare for the median occupied hectare.
Clustered suburban villages with occupied densities of 400/km^2 spread across a former suburban hinterland surrounded by truck gardens, with the occupants of the former suburban sprawl going to the closest suburban village for their main jumping off point for the regional transport system ... whether commuting to work elsewhere, traveling for shopping, education, leisure, or collecting items they have purchased ...
... that's not suburban sprawl.
But if we are going to continue having large numbers of people living in large cities ... IOW, by "going to continue", if we are going to live in that way sustainably ... then that kind of settlement system is going to have to surround those cities, because the current system of flying fresh strawberries from Chile for a supermarket in Northeast Ohio is a system that is premised on cheap and abundant energy resources ... and its economic growth is therefore premised on an inexhaustible supply of cheap and abundant energy. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
