Prince Charles, who has criticised the global food industry for shipping ‘vast quantities of commodities halfway round the world’. Photograph: Tim Ireland/PA

We have been impressed with him on occasion in the past, so it was with some surprise, and a tinge of nausea, that we read this :

Prince Charles is funding his charities with profits from shipping royal-branded mineral water 6,000 miles to the Middle East in an arrangement that has been described by Friends of the Earth as “completely insane”.

The prince campaigns vociferously for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and recently attacked the global food industry over the problems caused “when we ship vast quantities of commodities halfway round the world”. But he has used the proceeds from the export of bottles of Duchy Originals water from a Scottish estate close to Balmoral to luxury supermarkets in the Gulf to fund his favoured charities. It is part of a sales drive for the prince’s groceries brand in conjunction with Waitrose which has delivered £10m in profits over the past three years.

Luxury Duchy Originals hampers, including bottles of lemon and ginger drinks, are also on sale at the SuperNature grocery 10,000 miles away by sea in Singapore, while bottles of Duchy-branded organic ale made with barley from the prince’s Home Farm at Highgrove are being offered by drinks retailers in Australia and New Zealand.

Environmentalists have called for the prince to bring the trade to an immediate halt. “Shipping bottles of water around the world is completely insane,” said Craig Bennett, director of policy and campaigns at Friends of the Earth.

“It is absolutely ludicrous when there is perfectly good drinking water in the Middle East. It is very hard to dress up shipping water thousands of miles as helping the environment.”

The story has emerged 52 months after Charles made an apocalyptic speech in Rio de Janeiro warning that the world had “less than 100 months to alter our behaviour before we risk catastrophic climate change“.

The Royal Deeside water is shipped from Aberdeenshire to branches of Spinneys in Dubai, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi. Waitrose declined to say how much goes to the Gulf because of “commercial sensitivity” but said it was “very small”. One thousand cases sent via the Suez canal would produce an estimated 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Read the rest of the story here.