Nope. All regions need food to survive, period.
Replace the word 'survive' with the word 'thrive' if it makes you feel better.
Furthermore, removing all gold from rural regions would require both further increasing city gold—quite dramatically, I think—
Try to see the forest and not just the trees, Anaris. It's about balancing the relative bargaining power of the different regions. As I said earlier, it's not necessary to remove
all gold from rurals. That would be the most extreme version of this, but you could simply reduce it to a level where the necessity to trade is roughly equal. You could even introduce it gradually by, say, reducing rural regions' tax gold by 5% this week (or some other arbitrary number), another 5% next week until you see parity between buy and sell orders.
and jacking up food prices astronomically from what they've been. That's not something that players would readily accept.
As you pointed earlier, players set the prices. That's what the markets are for.
