Every morning, Marie Dupin slips into the skin of a personality, an event, a place or a fact at the heart of the news.
Chlorotalonil R471811 is a pesticide metabolite marketed by the agrochemical giant Syngenta and used for 50 years in France on field crops. A metabolite is a kind of pesticide residue, it is the form it takes when degrading in the environment. Very practical for killing fungi, its parent molecule, chlorotalonil, has been formally classified as a probable carcinogen by the European Union. It is associated with kidney tumors in laboratory animals and has been banned in Europe since 2019.
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And, as the newspaper revealed The world Wednesday April 5, traces of chlorotalonil R471811 were found in the tap water of at least 30% of French people. And if this presence is only brought to light now, it is quite simply because for a long time, this metabolite was simply not sought after. What the authorities were looking for in tap water was the pesticides themselves, not the breakdown of the molecules.
The Swiss example that does not reassure
Despite these revelations, chlorotalonil R471811 is not about to disappear. In Switzerland, for example, the authorities started detecting it in tap water in the mid-2010s. They immediately asked farmers to stop using it, but today the levels of contamination in water tables are still high. At least a third of the water drunk by the French is found to be non-compliant, but chlorotalonil R471811 still has a bright future ahead of it in our glasses of water.
With what impact on health? The company Syngenta which markets this product assures that the results of a study on rats will soon be transmitted to the health authorities to make it possible to determine a maximum health value. Which obviously raises a lot of questions. But the main question today is: what will the authorities do?
The government does not react
A few days ago, the Minister of Agriculture announced his desire to maintain use of S-metolachlor, another pesticide whose metabolites are also responsible for large-scale pollution of French groundwater. More than 24 hours after the newspaper’s revelations The world neither the Minister of Health nor the Minister of Agriculture reacted.
Whatever the political response to the health scandal of chlorotalonil R471811, we can very appropriately quote this sentence from Land of men (1938) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “Water: you have neither taste, nor color, nor aroma. We cannot define you. We taste you without knowing you. You are not necessary for life: you are life”.