Feudal estates had re-emerged, owned by plutocrats and guarded by mercenaries against the depredations of semi-feral bands seeking some form of survival outside the crowded cities, where the masses subsisted miserably on genetically modified algal protein. The middle classes muddled on between these extremes, avoiding the industrial food-system by growing their own food in their back gardens and allotments.

It would be easy to dismiss this dystopian vision as predictable coming from such a reactionary source, harking back to a lost rural idyll where peasants deferred dutifully to the landowning class and the urban was clearly demarcated and distant from the rural. But there’s some prescience in the piece in its warnings of future food insecurity for the UK and the rest of the world, with governments grasping at unpalatable technological fixes to feed rising populations, whilst those that can afford to by-pass such measures do so.

A glance at any supermarket’s shelves today makes it hard to conceive food security could become a real issue for the UK. Yes, nearly a billion people are undernourished in the world’s underdeveloped South, but here and in other developed countries it’s over- not under-eating that’s the problem, with some two billion people being overweight or obese worldwide.

But despite appearances, our food system is far from resilient; it is dangerously dependent on enormous quantities of oil and other fossil fuel-derived inputs. It takes 400 gallons of oil in food production, processing and distribution to feed the average American annually – 10 calories of energy burnt-up to make each single calorie of food energy. Similar ratios apply to the UK food system.

The trumpeted productivity of British agriculture, the recently harvested wheat, barley, oil-seed rape and almost everything else grown in the UK is reliant on off-farm inputs of chemicals, especially artificial nitrogen fertiliser. Fertiliser manufacture alone accounts for 40 per cent of all energy used in agriculture – it takes a tonne of oil to make a tonne of the stuff. This heavy use of fossil fuels and consequent emissions of greenhouse gases makes industrial farming unsustainable and vulnerable.

Depleting our remaining reserves of oil when production has, or may shortly, ‘peak’ is reason enough to question the long-term sustainability and security of our food system, but its companion – climate change - undermines any remaining foundations. The UK government has accepted the scientific consensus for an 80 per cent overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, with agriculture slated for 60 per cent cuts. The obvious way to achieve that figure is by reducing the use of artificial fertilisers and oil generally.

Ahead of the Copenhagen climate talks, scientists revised predicted sea-level rise upwards to over a metre. Nearly 60 per cent of the UK’s currently most productive farmland sits below sea level. Along with the threat of saltwater incursion onto farmland, climate change will bring reduced rainfall – parts of the south east of England already receive less rain than Spain. In a recent interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the government’s chief scientist, John Beddington, warned of ‘a perfect storm of food, energy and water shortages’.

Our food system is poorly prepared to weather this storm. Since the country’s last food security crisis during the Second World War, when German U-boats cut our extended food and fuel supply lines, the UK has fallen back into greater reliance on imports. Overall, UK food self-sufficiency stands at around 60 per cent, which the government considers fine for ‘a developed economy… able to access the food we need on the global market’. But 40-50 per cent of vegetables and over 90 per cent of fruit consumed here are imported, with 12 per cent coming from Africa.

Those African imports point us to another problem: the inequity and unsustainability of consuming food from a continent where 66 per cent of the area is dryland, desert or water-stressed. The ‘embedded’ water – the water that is used to produce crops that are then shipped overseas, and so is not available to produce food for Africans - is a growing concern. Every stem of imported green beans has soaked up four litres of Africa’s precious water. In developing countries particularly, large areas of farmland are being built over or degraded through inappropriate farming methods. The UN estimates that 50 per cent of the world’s arable soils will be ‘unuseable’ by 2050. Our government’s faith in the global market to provide our food indefinitely seems shortsighted.

The case of China confirms the mounting pressure on global food production. Containing one-fifth of the world’s population, China has less than one-seventh of the world’s farmland from which to feed its people. It’s not that China’s agriculture is backward or simply in need of technological improvement. Over the past half-century, Chinese grain production has increased four-fold. By the mid-1990s, China had overtaken the US as the world’s leading grain producer, and for the past decade has maintained around 95 per cent self-sufficiency.

But China can no longer satisfy its growing population and their changing diet. As the head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences observes, if national diets mimic those of the more affluent coastal provinces which have already adopted a more westernised diet, with higher meat consumption, ‘China will have to import 400million tons of grain from the world market. And I am afraid, in that case, that all of the grain output of the United States could not meet China’s needs.’

Rising populations, degrading soils and less reliable rainfall are brewing up Beddington’s ‘perfect storm’ and provoking a range of questionable responses. Farmland poor, but cash-rich countries like China and Saudi Arabia are buying up or leasing land in Africa and Asia in a new form of colonisation to grow food for their burgeoning populations.

The UK isn’t directly participating in this ‘global land grab’, but is hugely dependent on ‘ghost acres’ overseas. Take London’s food footprint. It has been estimated that to produce the capital’s annual food and drink needs requires some 20million hectares spread across the globe. To put that into perspective, the UK’s total area of farmland is 18.5million hectares – so feeding London’s current consumption patterns alone from our own land resource would use all that and more. A ‘global fairshare’ of farmland would require Londoners eating 70 per cent less meat, 40 per cent more local, seasonal and unprocessed food, and reducing their food waste by one tonne per person per year. A shift like that would represent a healthier, more sustainable diet for people and planet.

Politicians faced by such statistics blanch at the complex cultural changes and diverse means needed to make the transition to more sustainable patterns of consumption, instead grasping desperately at whatever tech-fixes offer the illusory hope of least adjustment to the present system. Genetically modified (GM) crops are the current favourite - despite the fact that after 20 years of development, not one GM crop is feeding humans directly, has increased yields to any significant degree and all require the same heavy inputs of artificial fertiliser and other oil-derived agrochemicals. The recent resurgence in both GM crops and nuclear power reflect policy-makers lack of courage, imagination and their woeful underestimation of the public’s capacity to accept harsh truths and change behaviour.

Fortunately, people aren’t waiting for far-sighted political leadership. Many farmers in developed and developing countries are already reducing reliance on costly chemicals and oil. In Africa, farmers have found that agroecological and near-organic methods are not only more affordable, but also give higher yields and greater resilience to drought. Suburbanites and city dwellers demonstrate a common-sense approach to coming challenges by taking practical steps to reduce their reliance on the corporate-controlled food system. Previously the preserve of old codgers growing monstrous leeks, allotments are now more desirable than overseas holiday time-shares; vegetable seeds outsell flower varieties, and a growing body of people are relearning neglected domestic skills of pickling, jam-making, bee and chicken-keeping.

This surge in suburban smallholding and greater self-sufficiency is more than ‘Barbara and Tom Good Lifery’, but reflects a well-founded anxiety over the sustainability and security of the food chain. Less than a decade ago, the blockade of a few supermarket food hubs and oil refineries by truckers and farmers angry at rising diesel prices brought London to within three days of running out of food, so testing the old secret service maxim that society is ‘only nine meals from anarchy’.

London’s ‘Food Czar’, Rosie Boycott, has tapped into the zeitgeist with her plans to create 2,012 inner-city food-growing areas by the time of the London Olympics. This might all sound piecemeal. Yet making mainstream farming less dependent on fossil fuels, reducing our reliance on unstable global markets, and increasing the number of people involved in growing food at the farm scale and individually is a sound strategy for contending with the coming shocks of peak oil and climate change.

Cuba, offers a practical blueprint of what such a future could be like. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended Cuba’s imports of oil and agrochemicals. Within a year, Cuban farmers had cut pesticide use from 22,000 tonnes annually to just under 2,000 tonnes. Concurrently the percentage of people employed in food production increased dramatically with some 15-24 per cent of the overall population engaged in food growing at any one time. Food security was achieved but not without enormous national effort. The challenge of replicating that effort in the UK is clear when one considers that less than one per cent of our population works in farming, compared to 15 per cent at the end of the Second World War, and 40 per cent in 1900.

But that is a challenge that must be taken if we are to avoid stumbling into a food-insecure future closer to Country Life’s dire dystopia.

Robin Maynard has worked on food and farming issues for the past 20 years for organisations including Friends of the Earth, FARM and the Soil Association. He has recently taken on an allotment, where he is attempting (badly) to turn theory into produce.