French health authorities found a “strong presumption of a link” between exposure to the pesticide and the risk of developing prostate cancer. Nearby Guadeloupe and Martinique had the world's first and third highest rates of prostate cancer in 2022, according to the World Cancer Research Fund.
**High prices**
Some are satisfied with the status quo. Nicolas Etile, a restaurateur in Martinique’s capital Fort-de-France, said prices were naturally high because of the distance from France, while benefits and subsidies helped living standards.
Not all price differences can be explained by transport costs, however.
Marie-Sainte’s packs of Lafort were bottled a few miles from the supermarket.
Each pack of six 1.5 litre bottles cost €3.85. An equivalent in the Paris region costs €1.50 at the same E.Leclerc supermarket, E.Leclerc’s website shows. A pack of imported Evian cost €11.99 at Carrefour, compared to €3.66 on the mainland.
Groupe Parfait, which has the local E.Leclerc franchise, did not respond to requests for comment. GBH, which has the Carrefour franchise, said local bottlers' small scale raised costs, along with the cost of imported plastic bottles, machinery and taxes. Evian was expensive because of transport costs, GBH said.
The company that bottles Lafort, along with another water brand Chanflor, is run by Bertrand Clerc, whose family has a long history on the island.
Clerc is descended from 19th-century enslaver Honore Marie Clerc, according to a review of birth registries, obituaries, French genealogy website Geneanet and France's publicly funded REPAIRS database.
Like many Béké families, the Clercs were compensated for the abolition of slavery. Members of the family were awarded around 75,000 francs in 1849, a Reuters tally of archives on the REPAIRS database shows.
Clerc declined an interview request and did not respond to questions.
Many in Martinique link such payments to white creole families's success. Some are calling for reparations.
Adelaide Marine-Gougeon, a researcher of white Creoles in Martinique at Paris’ Sorbonne University, said compensation was among a range of economic advantages that gave settlers a head start over former enslaved people after abolition, along with their connections to Europe and the Americas and marriage alliances.
Marcellin Nadeau, a national legislator, said there needed to be discussion about slavery reparations, possibly in the form of student bursaries or job opportunities.
If not, “tensions in society will get worse,” he told Reuters.
Emmanuel de Reynal, whose association “Tous Creoles” seeks to build bridges between Martinique’s communities, estimated only 50 of roughly 3,000 white Creoles were “very rich”.
“They are businesspeople. It is not wealth from the heritage of slavery,” said de Reynal, who is of Béké descent. GBH's Assier de Pompignan said Hayot was planning a monument to the crime of slavery and any reparations should be symbolic. He said the company's success was not related to “this history.”
**Banana tragedy**
Bernard Hayot’s late brother Yves Hayot imported the toxic pesticide chlordecone, widely used to fight weevils on banana plantations in Martinique and Guadeloupe. France banned the chemical on the mainland in 1990 but allowed it on the islands until 1993, according to parliamentary documents. The US banned it in the 1970s.
The French government's human health research organisation concluded in 2017 that almost the entire population of Martinique and Guadeloupe had been contaminated by exposure to the pesticide through its presence in the soil and food.