Managing an everlastingly polluted world. Food Policies and community health actions in the French West Indies
Résumé
What if policy makers took seriously the fact that we live in a permanently polluted world, rather than considering pollution to be harmless, negligible or easily manageable? What would be the consequences of such an attitude? Since the end of the 1990s, the rediscovery of chlordecone in the surface waters of the French West Indies has given us a small laboratory with which to answer these questions, by looking at how authorities have attempted to ensure that people live in safety.
This article analyzes how France managed the pollution – accepted as lasting for centuries- and how local and global knowledge, from both the field and laboratories, are intertwined in order to limit the threat to human health while people continue to live in a contaminated environment.
To this end, after describing the gradual discovery of the presence of chlordecone in different milieus and the associated health issues (water pollution, soil contamination, food contamination), it focuses on the question of standards relating to foodstuffs. It shows how three different regulatory tools were successively used, so that over a period of three years, some products were forbidden, then authorized, then forbidden again as the normative frameworks based on different assemblages of knowledge shifted. It finally analyzes how a community-oriented public health policy, JAFA, was built, aimed at identifying the households potentially overexposed to chlordecone and helping them reduce their exposure by different means.
Despite all these public policies, French West Indies remain laboratory islands, with one toxic substance and human populations, living together with no means of escape.
Origine :
Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
Loading...
