This text was initially published on the occasion of Manufacturing of Rights a pluridisciplinary colloquium in Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, 2015.

CASE #1

Date: 1970
Locations: French Antillesa

At issue:
This case centers upon bodily exposures to chlordécone/kepone (C10Cl10O), an organocholorine pesticide produced in the United States from 1951-1975 by Allied Chemical Company. Called an “insecticide of the poor,” ¹  the chemical was used primarily in tropical agriculture in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In the French Antilles (i.e. Martinique and Guadeloupe: territories that are fully incorporated parts of France and members of the European Union), the compound saw widespread use on banana plantations from the late 1970s-1990s, only after its interdiction in France, the United States, and in other countries of the global North. Considered a persistent organic pollutant (POP) by the United Nations Environment Programme, it has been posited that it would take between 150 and 600 years for the chemi- cal to break down naturally in the environment. Thus it is in the land—and in people’s bodies—to stay.

Because of the colonial and postslavery politics that condition the rela- tionship between France and these islands, community activists have charged that their exposure to this chemical has both potential and actual genocidal effects. ²  They point to the fact that island residents experience high rates of re- productive cancers (breast and prostate cancer foremost among them), but also articulate less scientifically-substantiated concerns about intersex births and the sexual effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals. ³  A complicated politics of culpability has arisen in the wake of this contamination. Various actors—in- cluding French (and European) regulatory agencies, the U.S. companies that first developed and distributed the compound, and the plantation owners that re/distributed it have been targeted as the source of blame. There has as yet been no legal action/tort claim in Martinique to address the contamination.

Against “Nature”:
Naturalist arguments about pesticide exposure abound. Most iconic in the anglophone world are those made by Rachel Carson in her 1962 Silent Spring, in which she argues that widespread use of synthetic insecticides/ fungicides: a) present a false sense that humans might control nature, b) suggest that humans are somehow separate from the natural world they seek to control and c) reflect our inability to apprehend ecological interdepend- ence, which in turn has lead to our “cumulative poisoning.” ⁴ 2002, p.173.] These positions are resonant with the discourse of contemporary grassroots political actors in many places around the globe who articulate opposition to “Big Chemical”: the multinational, corporate interests (and their government allies) that develop and distribute these products/“poisons.”

In the case of chlordécone, arguments about the “natural” tend to relate to the chemical’s status as both a carcinogen and an endocrine disruptor—a compound that produces estrogen-mimicking and anti-androgenic effects in both human and non-human animal bodies. ⁵ Claims about the sexual and reproductive consequences of exposure are thus at the heart of arguments about the contamination’s severity, and these in turn rely upon ideas about a “natural” body, its optimum health, and its “natural” genders, sexes, and sexualities. For example, while Martinican community activists make trenchant claims about chemical exposure and its attendant deleterious health effects, a range of actors on the island also link these exposures to a more generalized “crisis of masculinity,” that they index both by impotence from prostate trouble but also by their ideas about estrogenic male bodies and their relationship to same-sex desire. ⁶

Feminist science studies scholars and queer ecologists offer important rejoinders to these concerns: while they insist that we keep in view “the physical production and distribution of chemical harm and disposses- sion” ⁷ — the environmental racism/imperialism that makes possible unequal exposures— they also insist upon: a) the denaturalization of heterosexist ideas about a “natural” body and b) an acknowledgement of the tremendous sexual diversity found in “nature.” ⁸ They ask: what would it mean to take these anxieties seriously, without relying upon sex panic to justify our concerns about the bodily effects of toxicity?

Further background for the case:
Chlordécone was first synthesized in 1951 in the United States, one of many new compounds produced in the post-World War II chemical boom. Patented for the commercial market the next year by Allied Signal Company (later, the Allied Chemical Corporation), widespread production of the compound began in 1958 under the names Kepone and GC-1189. From 1958-1975, Allied’s factories in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Virginia pumped out 3.6 million pounds of the active material, out of which they made 55 different commercial formulations. Of these formulations, the most popular were its pesticides, created to combat roaches, leaf-eating insects, and the larvae of a variety of root-boring pests.

According to the National Research Council, between 90 and 99.2 percent of the chlordécone produced domestically from 1958-1975 was exported to Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean. ⁹  In the continental United States, the compound was only registered for use in very low doses in ant and cockroach traps, thus market saturation came quickly, but its recom- binations abroad were of a much stronger concentration, and were intended for widespread application in foreign agricultural industries.10

From 1974-1975, Allied subcontracted their chlordécone production to the Life Sciences Product Company’s factory in Hopewell, Virginia. During an accident at that factory in 1975, over 150 workers were exposed to the chemical at very high doses, and as much as 45,000kg of the compound was spilled into the James River. While early scientific studies focused on the acute effects of direct exposure for the workers, the deep contamination of the James prompted further attention to chlordécone’s chronic impacts. The year after the spill, U.S. regulatory agencies halted all domestic chlordécone production, and by 1979 an international agency for cancer research had declared chlordécone to be a (possible) carcinogen and a (certain) endocrine disruptor.

From 1972-1975 the Société Laurent de Laguarigue—one of a handful of family-owned companies that trace their land-ownership and wealth to the slave-holding, plantation past—was the principal importer of chlordécone in Martinique. When back-to-back hurricane seasons threat- ened the island’s banana plantations in 1979 (and their stocks of chlordécone had been stemmed by the U.S.’ interdiction), these businessmen came up with a plan. Though Allied Chemical had ceased production of the compound, representatives of this society traveled to the United States to arrange for the purchase of all that had been stockpiled in their storage facilities. They went even further, purchasing the patent for chlordécone and subse- quently funded the development of a new combination for use in the banana industry. Re-branded under the name Curlone, the société contracted with a factory in Brazil and recommenced export, sending Curlone principally to the francophone world and to Eastern Europe. In just two years, the Société Laurent de Laguarigue created a new, southern circuit for the pesticide’s production and circulation. Through application of both economic and political pressure, in 1981 these planters secured authorization from Parisian authorities to use Curlone, explicitly listing chlordécone as its active ingre- dient, in the Antilles. So, from 1981-1993 the Société de Laguarigue took up where Allied Chemical had left off, only ceasing their production and distribution when in 1990 the French government retracted their authori- zation for sale, giving the Société and their allied planters until 1992 to find new solutions to their pest problems. It took until 1993 for France to issue a definitive injunction against chlordécone’s use.

Activists point to three signal affronts relative to the French government’s handling of the chlordécone issue in the Antilles: 1) that the state issued permission to restart imports in 1981, even after the chemical had been regulated by international bodies and was subject to scientific re-evaluation; 2) that there was a three-year gap between the state’s (renewed) acknowl- edgement of the pesticide’s danger in 1990 and its final interdiction in 1993; and 3) that in the time since interdiction little has been done to address the already-advanced contamination of the island and to plan for its long-term after-effects.