We take the much-praised British countryside for granted, particularly the hedge-divided patchwork of fields and the mile after mile of drystone walls creeping up the hillsides. It wasn’t always, so and if we had been alive in 1750 we would have been up in arms. Before then, much of the land was open, unfenced and in common use, with far fewer people feeding off the land around them.

It’s true that some of this land was owned by the crown and the church, but there was enough to go round until the various Enclosure Acts fenced, hedged and walled off the rest with the ownership going to the appropriately-named landed gentry.

It was a land grab that drove the dispossessed into the new industrialising towns and made property sacrosanct. It puts in perspective the present-day protests against wind turbines and housing development in rural areas. It’s well summed up in a doggerel of the time:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose

Worryingly, we haven’t noticed that history is now repeating itself and this time they are fencing off the food rather than the land it’s grown on. Corporate feudalism is alive and thriving, replacing the old baronial system and making sure that it holds on to power.

World food production is now dominated by a small number of giant agribusinesses, chemical conglomerates and restaurant empires. They have enlisted the law to protect their interests and to control the research and development of innovative biotechnology.

All this intellectual property is patented to give ownership of plant varieties, new seeds and animal strains, many of them the result of genetic fiddling rather than the more traditional breeding. The result is that a small group of powerful players now controls the world trade in food, and particularly the price.

The top ten multi-national food companies make $1billion a day profit through an exploitative and short-term approach to the land, water and community rights. Excessive use of fertiliser, pesticides and patented seeds risks future food supplies as the emphasis is only on the immediate return.

It doesn’t have to be that way, as new planting methods have increased Indian rice yields dramatically without additional fertiliser. Similarly, Cuba showed that it could feed itself when Russian support evaporated, by concentrating on market gardening, and becoming the Todmorden of the Caribbean, rather than relying on mechanised, industrial agriculture.

We could, perhaps, learn from Bhutan, which is close to its stated ambition of becoming the first completely organic country in the world.