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FOR a creature that grows to only a few inches in length, and which demands little of the planet other than a silty seabed in which to excavate its burrow, the Scottish langoustine is about to leave a hefty carbon footprint.

Young’s, the seafood company, plans to ship the prawns from the West Coast of Scotland, where they are caught, on a 12,000-mile, nine-week round trip to Thailand, where they will be hand-peeled by workers earning 25p an hour.

They will then be shipped back to Scotland before being breaded and packaged as premium “Scottish Island” scampi for British supermarkets.

The proposal, which will mean 120 job losses at Young’s processing plant in Annan, near Dumfries, came to light on the day that the Government announced plans for a Climate Change Bill to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmentalists labelled the scheme “globalisation gone mad”, while the T&G union said that the loss of half the factory workforce to cheap labour in Bangkok would be a devastating blow to the fragile rural economy of Annan.

The langoustine shells are currently removed at the Annan plant with water jets.The company claims that shelling by hand produces a superior quality scampi, and that this cannot be carried out in Scotland because wage costs would be prohibitive.

Annan workers earn about £6 per hour and Young’s says it would need to employ about 350 people to do the job that the machines and 100 staff do at present, which is “not economically viable”.

From February the company intends to ship about 600 tonnes of langoustines to Bangkok each year for shelling, using regular freight routes, the most environmentally friendly transport option.

Duncan McLaren, of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said that movement would still “cost the earth”, because, based on the fuel consumed by an average freight ship, every tonne of shellfish shipped to the Far East will produce about half a tonne in CO2 emissions, or 300 tonnes a year.

Sir Nicholas Stern’s environmental report to the Government estimated that each tonne of greenhouse gases will cost society about £45 in environmental damage.

Mr McLaren said: “That means for the few pennies Young’s will save in wages, it will cost the rest of us and the planet £25 a tonne.”

John Holroyd, of the T&G, said: “This is all about exploiting cheap labour abroad. Consumers have to ask themselves, do they want to eat Scottish scampi that has been shipped halfway across the world, at a devasting cost to Scottish jobs and the environment?”

Mike Mitchell, Young’s director of scampi, said that cutting jobs at Annan was an “extremely difficult decision”, but he claimed that ultimately there would be no environmental impact as there would be “green savings” in water use and refrigeration.

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