Analysis of surface water reveals land pesticide contamination: an application for the determination of chlordecone-poll
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ENVIRONMENTAL AND HUMAN HEALTH ISSUES RELATED TO LONG TERM CONTAMINATION BY CHLORDECONE IN THE FRENCH WEST INDIES
Analysis of surface water reveals land pesticide contamination: an application for the determination of chlordecone-polluted areas in Guadeloupe, French West Indies Romain Rochette 1 & Vincent Bonnal 2,3 & Patrick Andrieux 1,4 & Philippe Cattan 5,6 Received: 2 April 2019 / Accepted: 2 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In Guadeloupe, the use between 1972 and 1993 of chlordecone, an organochlorine insecticide, has permanently contaminated the island’s soil, thus contaminating the food chain at its very beginning. There is today a strong societal requirement for an improved mapping of the contaminated zones. Given the extent of the areas to be covered, carrying out soil tests on each plot of the territory would be a long and expensive process. In this article, we explore a method of demarcating polluted areas. The approach adopted consists in carrying out, using surface water analyses, a hydrological delimitation that makes it possible to distinguish contaminated watersheds from uncontaminated ones. The selection of sampling points was based on the spatial analysis of the actual and potential contamination data existing at the beginning of the study. The approach was validated by soil analyses, after having compared the contamination data of the watersheds with the soil contamination data of the plots within them. The study thus made it possible to highlight new contaminated areas and also those at risk of contamination and to identify the plots to be targeted as a priority during future analysis campaigns by State services. Keywords Organochlorine pesticide . Watersheds . Contamination . Water . Soil
Introduction The health safety of food produced by agriculture is a major societal concern. Agricultural products can become contaminated by pesticides, either by their direct application to crops or indirectly by their transfer from the soil, to which they had Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Romain Rochette [email protected] 1
ASTRO Agrosystèmes Tropicaux, INRAE, 97170 Petit-Bourg, Guadeloupe, France
2
CIRAD, UMR TETIS, F-97130 Capesterre-Belle-Eau, Guadeloupe, France
3
TETIS, Univ Montpellier, AgroParisTech, CIRAD, CNRS, IRSTEA, Montpellier, France
4
LISAH, Univ Montpellier, INRAE, Institut Agro, IRD, Montpellier, France
5
CIRAD, UPR GECO, F-34398 Montpellier, France
6
GECO, Univ Montpellier, CIRAD, Montpellier, France
become fixed after application. The latter is especially the case with persistent molecules which were used in the past and still persist in the environment (Barron et al. 2017; Wu and Zhu 2019). When originating from old practices, this contamination is hard to predict, making it difficult to control the risk of exposure of human populations. An obvious prerequisite is the identification and mapping of contaminated areas. This problem is particularly relevant to the French West Indies where an organochlorine i
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