Yes. This is exactly the kind of interaction food brings.
But once again, the current solution is to force the rural lords to be at a market place on a regular basis, which is not fun. That's the issue. With things like auto-orders the city lords can forcefully make it the problem of the rural lord once, and if they succeed at it then they are set. They don't have to do it again every week.
To add to what Indirik says, there's a good deal of evidence that this kind of forced intra-realm conflict is what has been losing us players.
If you can't trust the Lords of your food-producing regions to provide their food at a reasonable price to the starving cities, that destroys the "team" feeling. Similarly if you can't trust the Lords of the cities not to bring troops in to loot the food straight out of the regions. (And yes, I know that's not currently possible.)
