“The response time is too long,” said a former deputy

“The response time is too long”, estimates Wednesday December 22 on franceinfo Jean-Yves Le Déaut, former deputy for Meurthe-et-Moselle and co-author of the report Pesticides in the West Indies, 10 years of perspective (2009), while a decree published on Wednesday recognizes prostate cancer linked to chlordecone, an insecticide used in banana plantations, as an occupational disease.

franceinfo: Chlordecone was banned in France in 1990 when the United States had already banned it in 1976, why did it take so long?

Jean-Yves Le Déaut: Because we are in a country in which the administration is slow and often formed on the same mold. The response time is too long. Today, we are 30 years after the French ban and we recognize prostate cancer linked to its exposure as an occupational disease: this is to be welcomed but the processing time for cases in France is too long.

We are talking about 90% of adults in Guadeloupe and Martinique contaminated with chlordecone, we know how many people that represents?

Not all are contaminated. Chlordecone was used to control an insect in banana plantations, the weevil. When we changed crops, root vegetables, which are very sensitive to chlordecone, were indeed eaten by many adults for quite a long time. But the blood values ​​show that, in most cases, we are below the reference limits.

“We have an environmental disaster, but the health risk is limited to professionals who have worked for a long time in the banana plantations.”

Jean-Yves Le Déaut, former deputy and co-author of a report on pesticides in the Antilles

to franceinfo

Professionals must also have been in contact with this product for more than 10 years to claim compensation, how is it explained that prostate cancers have developed?

With Catherine Procaccia, [co-rapporteur du rapport] we had called this compound a “chemical monster”. It is a compound that can remain for 300 or 400 years in the soil and in coastal waters, therefore in fish, before half of the molecule disappears. It is a molecule that is persistent and that is also why, in parallel with the treatment of health risks, we must find means of remedying the soil because otherwise we will have the problem continuously.