While judges ruled in January 2023 that the scientific data at the time was not sufficient to predict the effects of chlordecone on humans, an investigation by France info and Radio France, published this Friday, April 21, reveals that scientists were already alerting to the risks when using the pesticide.
Pesticides: why can’t we live without them?
Chlordecone-based insecticides, which were used in West Indian banana plantations between 1972 and 1993, contaminated the island’s water and soil for decades. Its effects have been devastating on the population of Guadeloupe, which is recording the highest rate of prostate cancer in the world and where the pesticide was detected in the blood of 90% of the adult population Today.
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Scientists have been warning about the risks since the 1980s
The pronunciation of the dismissal was based on the prescription of the health scandal, the judges considering that at the time, economic interests took precedence over health and environmental issues, and that the “public, administrative and political powers” were in the ignoring. Three months later, the Radio France investigation unit discovered new elements which nevertheless contradict this reasoning.
Ecology: the brute, the poisoner and the arsonist
A former member of the toxics commission, Isabelle Plaisant, was present at a meeting devoted to the approval of Curlone – the commercial name of a chlordecone product – in June 1981. She remembers that the chairman of the commission René Truhaut, toxicology expert, WHO Gold Medalist and president of the Academy of Pharmacy, had alerted “on the fact that the WHO had just classified chlordecone as a possible carcinogen for humans”. Like René Truhaut, all the experts already warned at the time about the toxicity of chlordecone, but their warning was not taken into account.
Many missing archives in mainland France and the West Indies
In 2008, at the start of the judicial inquiry, the minutes of the toxic commissions held between 1972 and 1989 had remained untraceable. It is only in 2019, for the auditions of the parliamentary commission of inquiry on chlordecone, that they have finally been discovered. But there were still missing documents over an eight-year period.
Nitrite: “We have to put an end to charcuterie for the ailments on the one hand, and that for the poor on the other! »
Today, these documents remain missing. This is also the case in the West Indies, where a drinking water analysis report to the Departmental Directorate of Health and Social Affairs (DDASS) in Martinique is missing. In March 2021, in a newspaper interview France West Indies, the public prosecutor Rémi Heitz also acknowledged the absence of customs slips, which included the quantities of chlordecone imported into the French islands, and the destruction of the samples of vegetables contaminated with chlordecone analyzed by the repression of fraud.
