The Toxic Legacy of the French Banana
France knew the pesticide chlordecone could cause cancer and destroy the environment. It allowed banana plantations in Martinique and Guadeloupe to use it anyway.
SEPTEMBER 26, 2024
In the spring of 2022, a set of advertisements appeared in the Paris Metro and in cities throughout France. The ads showed a cartoon of a stereotypically French man or woman, in a beret and striped shirt. Under the figure’s arm, where a baguette should have been: an enormous banana. In large red, white and blue letters: LA FRENCH BANANE.
The bananas depicted were French in the sense that, as indicated in small letters at the bottom of the ads, they came from Guadeloupe and Martinique. France colonized these Caribbean islands in the 17th century and established major sugar plantations in them that, relying on slavery, became a crucial part of the economy. In 1946, the islands ceased to be colonies and instead became departments of France — in principle at least, as much a part of France as Hawaii or Alaska is part of the U.S. Even so, many of the old colonial dynamics have remained.
If you find yourself eating a French banane, chances are good that it originated on a farm owned by the descendants of colonists — often known in the islands as white Creoles or békés. Although they make up less than 1 percent of the French West Indian population, they own more than half the farmland and control 90 percent of the agricultural sector.
By approving the use of chlordecone, France had chosen the economic interests of a handful of landowners over the health and well-being of the men, women and children who labored in their fields.
Chances are also good that the laborers who work on that banana farm have been exposed to dangerous levels of chlordecone — a pesticide authorized for use in the islands in the 1970s that is also a known carcinogen and has been linked to prostate cancer, Parkinson’s disease and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Although it was eventually banned in the 1990s, chlordecone can take up to 700 years to decompose. It persists in substantial portions of the islands’ soil, waterways, coastline and crops. More than 90 percent of residents have detectable levels of chlordecone in their blood, and the islands have the highest rates of prostate cancer in the world by a dramatic margin. Chlordecone has also been linked to a variety of other health problems, including infertility, pancreatic cancer and liver disease. As much as 40 percent of the cultivated land in Martinique, and 20 percent in Guadeloupe, is contaminated, making it unsuitable for growing root vegetables or raising livestock. (Tree fruits, including bananas, aren’t at risk of contamination because they grow above the soil.) Much of the freshwater and coastal marine environments is contaminated as well, which has decimated the local fishing industry. As a result, 80 to 90 percent of food products consumed in the islands are imported — a significant expense for most households in two of the poorest areas of France.
The attitude of the French government, now and over the past 40 years, reflects the relationship between mainland France and its former colonies. The white Creole landowners, the descendants of slaveholders, were the most relentless lobbyists for the right to use chlordecone, despite clear warnings about its dangers. The workers who were poisoned were descendants of enslaved people. The French state seemed to have made the same choice in the 1970s as it had hundreds of years before: By approving the use of chlordecone, France had chosen the economic interests of a handful of landowners over the health and well-being of the men, women and children who labored in their fields.
Today even the healthy inhabitants of the islands live with the fear of future sickness. Patricia Chatenay-Rivauday, who runs an organization called Association VIVRE that campaigns for victims’ rights and environmental reforms, has lost as many as 11 friends and family members to illnesses associated with chlordecone contamination. “We’re in a state of permanent anxiety,” she told us when we met her at her home in Guadeloupe. “When you lose a brother or a sister, or a father, you necessarily say to yourself, ‘I’m the only survivor.’ But what’s the probability that it [chlordecone poisoning] will come on in 10, 15, 20 years?”
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Until the 20th century, bananas were cultivated in Martinique and Guadeloupe mainly as a source of food for enslaved people and to provide shade for coffee and cocoa crops. As the importance of sugar exports waned, plantation owners turned to bananas, and for almost a century, the banana industry has dominated the French West Indian agricultural economy. But since World War II, the two islands have struggled to keep pace with far larger, more sophisticated banana growers in Latin America. Without 129 million euros (about $144 million) in yearly subsidies from the EU, the banana industry in the French West Indies would not exist.
In the 1970s, in part to compete with Latin America, the French government authorized banana growers in Martinique and Guadeloupe to use a new pesticide — chlordecone — to kill the weevils that lay eggs in the bulbs of banana trees and destroy them from the inside.
Chlordecone was developed in the U.S. in the 1950s, but it was not until the 1970s, when two other common pesticides were banned, that it began to be widely used. During this decade, the American company Allied Chemical Corporation (now known as Honeywell) ramped up production of the compound to offer a durable, effective product that could kill all manner of pests, from fire ants to potato beetles. Soon, the company was producing between 1.5 and 3 tons per day of what it called Kepone in a plant on the banks of the James River in Hopewell, Virginia. By 1974, chlordecone was used around the world, and Allied, through a subcontractor, was the sole manufacturer. The following year, two doctors from the Virginia Department of Health alerted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that workers in the plant were displaying symptoms such as enlarged livers unexplained blindness and uncontrollable tremors. The plant was shuttered, 100 miles of the James River was closed to fishing and 29 workers were hospitalized. Chlordecone was banned from use in the U.S. in 1976.
When Allied first started producing Kepone in the late 1960s, the French government refused to authorize its use, considering it too toxic. But after banning the banana industry’s preferred pesticide, beta-hexachlorocyclohexane, in 1972, the government came under pressure from the agricultural sector to approve a replacement. It approved Kepone that same year. But by the end of the decade, Allied had stopped producing Kepone, and stocks were about to run out. A French company based in Martinique acquired the rights to produce the pesticide and distribute it in France, subject to approval by the French government. That company was directed by Yves Hayot, a white Creole landowner whose family arrived in Martinique in 1680 and made its fortune in sugar; the family still owns the largest banana plantation in Martinique. And so in 1981, with a captive market comprising basically every banana grower in the French West Indies, Hayot’s company applied to the French Ministry of Agriculture for approval to distribute chlordecone under the trade name Curlone.
Throughout the ’80s, banana plantation laborers were applying chlordecone to virtually every banana tree in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Often the laborers were responsible for providing their own protective equipment; many went without.
At that time, the committee within the French Agriculture Ministry that examined pesticide applications was led by a toxicologist named René Truhaut. Most of the rest of the committee was dominated by people close to agricultural and industrial interests. Isabelle Plaisant, one of the few public health officials on the committee, said she remembers Truhaut warning her and her colleagues before the meeting in which Curlone came up for a vote. “He said, ‘Watch out, watch out for this product,’” she told us. Reliving the scene, Isabelle hunched her shoulders and bounced up and down in her seat, demonstrating how worked up Truhaut was about it. “He was really agitated,” she said.
At the end of that meeting, however, Curlone was granted a provisional authorization for sale. It was to be used exclusively against the banana weevil on banana plantations, which ensured that it would never be used in mainland France. There was also the stipulation that the ministry would conduct further studies before it issued a definitive judgment. There’s no record of any significant studies being undertaken, but the committee rubber-stamped Curlone with full approval five years later. Throughout the ’80s, banana plantation laborers were applying chlordecone to virtually every banana tree in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Often the laborers were responsible for providing their own protective equipment; many went without.
In 1990, citing the chemical’s high toxicity and its persistence as a pollutant, the French Ministry of Agriculture retracted the authorization of Curlone. But under pressure, as always, from lobbying groups dominated by the islands white landowners, the ministry granted a two-year exception for the use of chlordecone in the French West Indies, given the extent to which the banana industry relied on the pesticide. When the extension was set to expire, Hayot himself, acting in his capacity as the president of Martinique’s banana growers’ cooperative, wrote to the minister of agriculture and received two further brief extensions. The use of Curlone was finally banned throughout all of France’s departments in 1993.
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It was sweet potatoes, not bananas, that finally brought chlordecone into public view. In August 2002, police seized 23 cartons of sweet potatoes that had arrived from Martinique in the French port of Dunkirk. They were acting on a tip that the potatoes were contaminated with chlordecone. Until then, the extent of chlordecone contamination in the islands had escaped public notice, but an article on the incident in the French newspaper Libération caused an uproar, and activists, unions and local politicians in Martinique and Guadeloupe started campaigning for justice. In 2006, 15 organizations, along with Chatenay-Rivauday (the activist who runs Association VIVRE) and another individual plaintiff, filed a criminal complaint for poisoning and endangerment. Over the past two decades, the efforts of these and other activists, lawyers, doctors and scientists have brought to light extremely damning evidence: reports on persistent pollution that were available to policymakers all along, records of institutional alarms that were sounded and ignored, and assessments of the Ministry of Agriculture’s own regulatory commissions.
Meanwhile, the French state has equivocated and prevaricated. Three consecutive action plans, known as Plans Chlordécone, ran to fewer than 20 pages each, offering not much more than generalities about the need for fact-finding and research. A 2005 parliamentary inquiry found that the scientific knowledge available when chlordecone was approved for use was insufficient to justify its prohibition. The director of the inquiry dismissed any question of neocolonial bias: “Often overseas populations have the feeling of a misunderstanding of the specificities of these territories,” he observed on the floor of the National Assembly. He added that the very existence of the inquiry testified to the contrary: “The commission has in fact acquired the deep conviction that what happened in Martinique and Guadeloupe could have happened in any French department.”
In 2019, another parliamentary report gathered testimony of the pressure the banana lobby exerted on public officials from the 1960s to the 1990s. It remarked upon the “lack of ambition” of past chlordecone plans and made recommendations for a new plan — Plan Chlordécone IV — that included measures to protect the local population from exposure and to eliminate chlordecone contamination in locally produced food. The report also recommended a process of reparations, though without providing much detail on what this process might involve.
The same year, however, in a “grand debate” at the Élysée Palace meant to give elected officials from French overseas departments a chance to put their concerns to the president directly, President Emmanuel Macron insisted that “one mustn’t say that [chlordecone] is carcinogenic because it’s not true, and it feeds into fear.” Yes, rates of prostate cancer in Martinique and Guadeloupe were sky-high, and yes, a study had proved that chlordecone caused cancer in rats and mice — but, Macron maintained, without experiments on humans in a controlled environment (as with the rats and mice), it could not be proved that chlordecone caused prostate cancer in people. With his sleeves pushed up and his arms crossed, Macron sounded both imperious and wounded. French West Indian lawmakers sat in a row, exchanging glances. “If a direct link had been proved to me,” Macron told them, “I would have accepted the responsibilities that go along with it. Because that’s my temperament.”
Several months later, a group of activists in Martinique formed the Collectif des Ouvrier(e)s Agricoles Empoisonné(e)s par des Pesticides — the Collective of Agricultural Workers Poisoned by Pesticides. Under the leadership of Yvon Serenus, the group’s president, it had two main goals: First, justice and reparations; second, improving working conditions and supporting victims. The Collectif is headquartered in the town of Ducos, in a vast, near-empty meeting hall decorated with framed photos of 20th-century labor activists and anticolonialists such as Frantz Fanon. “In Martinique we say, ‘[The békés] who are here, they’re the grandsons of slaveholders,’” Serenus explained when we met him and his colleagues Patricia Mountanda and Robert Saé.
“Everyone talks about chlordecone, about poisoning,” Saé said. “You don’t hear about the agricultural workers, and we’re the ones who got poisoned.”
That message resonated with Mountanda, whose husband, David, had died after a long battle with pancreatic and colon cancer, having spent his career working on banana plantations at the height of chlordecone’s use in Martinique. “It’s a long road,” she told us. “It won’t be easy with such powerful forces against us.”
Among the Collectif’s early objectives was to visit banana plantations and gather testimony from past and present agricultural workers. At that time, the state didn’t cover blood tests for chlordecone, and the out-of-pocket cost was prohibitively expensive for workers. Another of the Collectif’s functions is helping victims navigate the thickets of French bureaucracy. Plan Chlordécone IV went into effect in 2021; among other things, it provides research funds for developing methods to decontaminate the soil and water, offers free soil tests and runs a robust public education initiative to promote safe practices in subsistence farming. But the plan’s answer to the call for reparations was a modest compensation package for agricultural workers diagnosed with prostate cancer, Parkinson’s disease or non-Hodgkin lymphoma — if they could prove they had worked with pesticides for at least 10 years. The Collectif has spoken to many workers suffering from a host of other illnesses the state does not indemnify. Joceline Lapointe, for example, started working with pesticides at the age of 19; now 68, she suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and progressive blindness in one eye. Under Plan IV, she doesn’t qualify for benefits. With the Collectif’s help, she’s mounting a case for compensation.
Mountanda found herself faced with a delegate from the Ministry of Health who was hemming and hawing. “I had to interrupt,” Mountanda recalled. “I said, ‘Is the death of my husband not significant enough to show you how dangerous it is to work under such conditions?’”
Other plantation workers are afraid to speak up. “There are people I call back,” said Virginie Mousseau, a lawyer who works pro bono with chlordecone victims, “and I say, ‘You meet all the conditions. You don’t want that income?’” Many people still depend upon employers they might make claims against, or have family members who do. The relationship between laborers and banana plantation owners is complex, Mousseau told us. “There’s a certain kind of respect for — the employer, to avoid putting it another way,” she said, with some discomfort. “Voilà: for the master. ‘He’s the one who houses us. We still live on the plantation.’ And so yeah, there’s this economic dependence.”
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The court case that the 15 organizations launched against the French government in 2006 was not decided until last year. The judges wrote in their decision that they were persuaded of “the antisocial behavior of certain economic actors in the banana industry, amplified by the imprudence, the negligence, the ignorance of public authorities, administrators and politicians.” But they decided that the statute of limitations on the charges filed, which concerned events dating back as far as 1981, had already expired by the time the judicial proceedings began. As a result, they dismissed the case entirely. (The plaintiffs have appealed the decision, and the appeals court will hear their case this fall.)
Partly in response to the dismissal, earlier this year French lawmakers officially acknowledged the state’s role in the chlordecone disaster. “The French Republic recognizes its responsibility,” the statement reads, “for the health, moral, ecological and economic damage suffered by the territories of Guadeloupe and Martinique and their populations resulting from the marketing authorization of phytopharmaceutical products based on chlordecone.” In the Collectif’s view, this acknowledgement is an entirely symbolic gesture. It added not a penny to Plan IV’s budget of 130 million euros. (Compare this sum with the 1.4 billion euros France spent to make the Seine swimmable in time for the Olympics.)
“It’s absolutely nothing,” Serenus said. “They’d rather just smooth things over until people start to die. It’s not even spackling. It’s not even DIY. They’re letting people die.”
And so the work of the Collectif continues. “You have to make the pressure so enormous that maybe they’ll take a small step,” Saé told us.
Until recently, the state was reluctant to subsidize chlordecone blood tests for Martinican and Guadeloupean residents. In a meeting with government officials at the Élysée Palace last year, Mountanda found herself faced with a delegate from the Ministry of Health who was hemming and hawing. “I had to interrupt,” Mountanda recalled. “I said, ‘Is the death of my husband not significant enough to show you how dangerous it is to work under such conditions?’” The delegate stormed out of the room to smoke a cigarette, but when she came back, she told Mountanda and her colleagues that she’d see what she could do. “And since February, we’ve had the free [blood] testing,” Mountanda said.
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The advertisements that brought “LA FRENCH BANANE” to the Paris Metro were paid for by the Union des Groupements de Producteurs de Bananes de Guadeloupe et Martinique, or UGPBAN, a syndicate that represents the banana cooperatives in each island (BANAMART in Martinique and Les Producteurs Guadéloupeens, or LPG, in Guadeloupe). Operating a successful banana growing business without membership in these cooperatives is all but impossible. For the last two decades, UGPBAN has effectively controlled the French banana industry: In addition to running banana exports and setting and enforcing quality assurance standards, the syndicate has sole responsibility for lobbying on behalf of the industry at national, European and international levels.
If you visit UGPBAN’s website, you won’t find mention of any of the grands békés who operate the islands’ largest banana plantations. Among the dozens of banana growers featured on the website, there isn’t a single white face.
What you’ll find instead are portraits of UGPBAN’s “petits planteurs,” banana growers who operate small plantations, most fewer than 10 hectares (24.7 acres). In Martinique, plots of this size or smaller account for only 16.2 percent of the total land used for banana growing. Together with UGPBAN’s emphasis on “la banane durable” — shorthand for a shift toward more environmentally sustainable, less chemically intensive farming practices — the website’s focus on small plantations, whose owners work the fields themselves, gives the impression of a scrappy, socially conscious and optimistic industry.
The reality is somewhat grimmer. The 129 million euros the EU sends yearly in support of French West Indian banana producers isn’t nearly enough to keep the industry afloat, according to Alexis Gouyé, the president of BANAMART. A new fungus, black cercospora, that emerged in 2010 has made things even more expensive, and more precarious.
For many of the petits planteurs, UGPBAN, BANAMART and LPG are themselves a major source of frustration. Christian Zelela, a petit planteur who has been growing bananas in Martinique since 2002, told us that despite the impression given by UGPBAN’s website, small-scale farmers have very little say in BANAMART’s decision-making because votes are allotted according to acreage. (Gouyé confirmed Zelela’s characterization of BANAMART’s structure.) Because bananas are so difficult to make profitable on such a small scale, Zelela said he finds himself sliding further and further into debt. And because UGPBAN is the industry’s only point of contact with the French government and the EU, he said it feels impossible for planters like him to make their voices heard.
“They’ve managed to make me disgusted with my work,” he told us. He’d abandoned his banana crop for the year. He said he was thinking of giving up bananas altogether; he was also considering no longer exporting his crops and selling them in the island instead. “I’m more into diversification,” he told us. “I’m just hoping that the market in Martinique is sufficient for me to live from what I produce.”
He said he was planning to grow “a little of everything.” He’d already dedicated a field to sweet potatoes and dachine, another kind of root vegetable. He’d had them analyzed, he said, and he assured us they were safe to eat.
✺ Published in “Issue 20: Lessons” of The Dial
