On January 2nd this year judges in Paris dismissed a legal case over the contamination of local ecosystems by the heavy use of the pesticide chlordecone in the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe from 1972 to 1993.
This insecticide was classified as “potentially” carcinogenic by the World Health Organisation back in 1979 and was banned in mainland France from 1990, but continued to be authorised for use in the French overseas départements of Martinique and Guadeloupe until 1993 under a ministerial exemption.
Now, 16 years after the first legal complaint was filed, Paris-based judges who specialise in investigating medical and health cases have ruled that events took place too long ago for the case to proceed. In their written judgement, the two judges acknowledged there was a “health scandal” in the form of an “environmental breach whose human, economic and social consequences affect and will continue to affect the daily lives of inhabitants for many years”.
According to the state health body Santé Publique France, more than 90% of the adult population in the two islands has been contaminated by chlordecone and that the incidence rates of prostate cancer on the islands “are among the highest in the world”.
Nonetheless, the two judges dismissed the case, in particular because of the difficulty of “providing proof of the acts complained of … which had been committed 10, 15 or 30 years before the complaints were filed”.
The Green mayor of Pointe-à-Pitrre in Guadeloupe, Harry Durimel, who is also a lawyer for victims of the pesticide, has announced his intention to appeal the judges' decision. Here he tells Mediapart about the local impact of this judicial ruling.
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Mediapart: What was your reaction when you heard on January 2nd that the case had been dismissed? Were you expecting it, given that the initial complaint had been filed 16 years ago?
Harry Durimel: It was actually me who drew up that first legal complaint in 2006, along with several citizens associations. It was a campaigning initiative to call for action from the French state over the scourge of chlordecone. But from the start the prosecution mounted a real guerilla campaign against us to block the case. The justice system interviewed the civil parties [to the claim] barely a year ago...
So I'm not surprised by the decision, but I am stunned. We learnt the news through the media even though there is an electronic platform in which you can get access to the various rulings pronounced. But we weren't informed of it. It's a method of unsettling us and slowing us down in our struggle, because there's a deadline of just ten days in which to appeal from the date that the letter is sent.
So we're going to appeal. And if we don't succeed at the court of appeal we'll go to the Cour de Cassation [editor's note, the highest court in France]. In short, the fight goes on.
In any case, there isn't just the legal route: politics cannot stay silent when the law considers that there is no case to answer in the face of such serious injustice. I recall that in 2018, during a visit to Martinique in 2018, Emmanuel Macron described the chlordecone pollution as an “environmental scandal”. It's down to him to bring a political dimension to this case which affects the health of a million [citizens of the French] Antilles.
Mediapart: Won't this decision increase the major lack of trust towards the French state that exists among citizens in the French Caribbean? In 2021 chlordecone often cropped up as an issue among those in Martinique and Guadeloupe who were reluctant to get the vaccine against Covid-19.
H.D.: We're faced here with a systematic problem: cash takes precedence over the health of our citizens. Not to mention that many local politicians believed in the virtues of chlordecone to keep the banana plantations, save jobs or maintain France's trade balance. At the time, environmentalists weren't listened to at all.
This massive chlordecone pollution has created a deep mistrust towards the French state, something which was shown in particular at the last presidential election [in 2022] with a massive vote for [far-right] Marine Le Pen.
This gap between the great French metropolitan areas and the outer-fringes of the Antilles grows each year, as there are so many reasons to feel excluded. Slavery in the Antilles lasted 400 years and the experts estimate that chlordecone will stay in the ecosystems for 700 years.
I worry that this decision to dismiss the case will unite the discontent and in the long term affect the social contract.
Mediapart: What's the situation today with the use of pesticides, especially glyphosates, in the French Caribbean? Are we seeing a trend of converting to environmentalism in banana plantations?
H.D.: We've seen no real radical change. Agro-industry, which demands the massive use of pesticides, is everywhere. We're still pursuing the model of industrial-scale banana production aimed at export, while in Martinique and Guadeloupe we import hormone-treated beef and poultry.
Yet the Antilles could be a laboratory for a sustainable way of agriculture that responds to local food needs, and shows how a land contaminated by pesticides can transform itself environmentally.
Mediapart: Do you think compensation will be possible one day?
H.D.: The magistrates in charge of this case have done a good job in highlighting the truth about the chlordecone scandal. What's missing today is justice.
Compensation is indispensable, essential, especially as the preamble in the [French] Constitution guarantees the protection of everyone's health.
Today they must compensate, decontaminate and prevent. To do this, Parliamentarians must vote through a law similar to that in 2010 which allowed for compensation payments to be given to the victims of the French nuclear tests in Polynesia.
And for a genuine long-lasting 'de-chlordeconisation' plan for the Antilles to be deployed, unlike the fake chlordecone programmes currently in operation whose main purpose is to let the polluters off the hook.
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- The original French version of this interview can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter