‘A deliberate poisoning’: how a banned pesticide haunts the French Caribbean

Prostate cancer rates are among the world’s highest in Guadeloupe and Martinique, where chlordecone was widely used on plantations for more than 20 years

Tiburce Cléon was just a teenager when he began working in the vast banana plantations of Guadeloupe. For five decades, he toiled long hours in the fields under the Caribbean sun. Then, a few months after retiring in 2021, he was given a diagnosis that many of his colleagues had received before him: prostate cancer.

Guadeloupe and Martinique, two French islands in the Caribbean, have some of the highest rates of prostate cancer in the world. One of the culprits is exposure to an extremely toxic and persistent pesticide called chlordecone. This fine white powder was widely used at banana plantations on the islands from 1972 to 1993 to combat the banana weevil, a pest that ravaged crops.

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