Capital and Chlordecone Poisoning in the French Caribbean Islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique: A Thesis on Crimes of the Market

ABSTRACT

Guadeloupe and Martinique, two French overseas territories located in the Caribbean, are today facing serious public health crises; particularly, the highest rates of prostate cancer in the world. These crises resulted from the French colonial policy of primitive accumulation, which authorized two decades of the use of a carcinogenic pesticide, chlordecone (a.k.a. Kepone), by French settler farmers to control banana weevil pests. This was despite evidence of its lethal toxicity. Deploying the theoretical arguments of Market Criminology, this paper discusses the current health crises in both islands and the political economy of predation which created them as criminal. This is in sync with a growing body of literature which contextualizes preventable market-generated harms as criminal.

KEYWORDS:

• Primitive accumulation
• French capital
• chlordecone
• Guadeloupe and Martinique
• prostate cancer

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Ifeanyi Ezeonu

Ifeanyi Ezeonu is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the Brock University, Ontario, Canada. He has research interests, and has published, on market criminality, street gangs and violent armed groups, the sociology of energy and natural resources, and the deleterious effects of market rationality on Sub-Saharan Africa. His book, Market Criminology: State-Corporate Crime in the Petroleum Extraction Industry (Routledge, 2018) introduces the school of Market Criminology, which expands the criminological imagination to accommodate preventable market-generated harms in variegated forms of capitalism.