Short abstract:

The use of the insecticide chlordecone in French West Indies caused a long-standing soil and water pollution. This paper traces how biomonitoring, first used in epidemiological studies, became a public health instrument and confronts it to the Islands' history of colonial and chemical violence.

Long abstract:

The Martinique and Guadeloupe Islands are subjects of a long-standing soil and water pollution due to the residues of the insecticide chlordecone, an organochloride compound and persistent organic pollutant – continuously caused by other pesticides still largely in use. In 2013 and 2014, an epidemiological study conducted by the French public health agency Santé Publique France concluded that more than 90% of the 742 participants of the study living in both Islands had detectable chlordecone concentration in their blood (higher than 0,02 μg/L). In the following years, from being an epidemiological methodology, chlordecone biomonitoring became a public health instrument, as every person living in the French West Indies could access their level of chlordeconemy for free. This paper traces the elaboration of a public health policy based on the biomonitoring of the inhabitants and confronts it to the history of colonial and chemical violence due to massive pesticide use in Martinique and Guadeloupe. It sheds light on the environmental justice movement which claim to have free access to the biomonitoring of chlordecone and documents the tortuous regulatory science and policy process which turned exposure thresholds into public health recommendations. It concludes by showing how this damage-centered policy reinforces the individual frame of biosurveillance (in particular over bodies considered vulnerable such as pregnant women's, even if they were initially ignored by most of public health measures) by extracting them of local cultural practices and socio-ecological relationships.