French lawmakers have recognised the state’s “partial responsibility” in allowing a toxic pesticide to be used in the French West Indies despite health warnings, inflicting long-term harm on the islands and their people.
Chlordecone, also known under the brand name Kepone, is a pesticide that was widely used to eliminate weevils in banana plantations in France’s former colonies turned overseas territories of Guadeloupe and Martinique from 1972 until 1993.
France banned its use on the mainland in 1990, but allowed its continued use on the Caribbean islands for another three years.
Lawmakers in the lower house of parliament on Tuesday evening voted unanimously in favour of a bill in which “the state acknowledges its share of responsibility for the health-related, moral, environmental and economic harm suffered by the territories of Guadeloupe and Martinique and by their populations” as a result of the pesticide’s prolonged use.
The Senate has already backed the move.
Almost 90 percent of people in Martinique and Guadeloupe have been contaminated with chlordecone, according to research cited by France’s Agence Nationale de Sécurité Sanitaire de l’Alimentation, de l’Environnement et du Travail (Anses).
The chemical has been linked to prostate cancer – the rate of which in Martinique and Guadeloupe is among the highest in the world – as well as stomach and pancreatic cancer.
Studies have also shown adverse effects on the nervous system, reproduction, the hormonal system and the functioning of certain organs including the heart, according to Anses.
A 1979 report from the World Health Organisation found that chlordecone was “carcinogenic in mice and rats” and it was reasonable to regard it as a “carcinogenic risk to humans”.
In 2009, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants banned its use worldwide.
The new law sets France “the goal of decontaminating soil and water polluted” by the pesticide, according to a copy on the parliament’s website.
It also aims at “compensating all victims of this contamination” in Guadeloupe and Martinique.
“This compromise text will help restore deeply damaged trust,” said Socialist lawmaker Elie Califer, who is from Guadeloupe and put forward the bill.
But he said more work needed to be done to ensure reparations.
Lawmaker Olivier Serva, also from Guadeloupe, said he was “not entirely satisfied”.
“But we’ve come far, given that the state initially didn’t even want to acknowledge its partial responsibility,” he added.
Tuesday’s vote came after the lower house last week backed repealing outdated slavery legislation that was never annulled despite the practice being abolished in 1848.
Ships departing from French ports between the 17th and 19th centuries forcibly transported more than one million men, women and children from Africa into slavery, many in plantations in its Caribbean colonies, according to expert estimates.
Activists say the legacy of slavery endures through inequalities between mainland France and former colonies that are now overseas territories, as well as racism.
Martinique official Serge Letchimy hailed a vote that he said had come “to shatter a system that tramples on the truth, absolves the guilty, and scorns the victims”.
The Paris appeal court will later this month decide whether or not to reopen a criminal investigation into the scandal, after Paris magistrates dropped it more than three years ago, saying too much time had passed to secure convictions.
