Pesticides: a health hazard for Europeans ?

They are invisible, but traces of them can be found everywhere: in our food, in plants, in the soil, in groundwater, in the air and in our bodies.

These are pesticide residues. Europe is one of the world’s biggest consumers of them, and the leading exporter.

The risks they pose to the environment, and to animal and human health, are at the heart of a vigorous debate, particularly as regards their intensive use in the agricultural sector.

The European Union was planning to halve its use of them within a few years.

Yet it recently dropped this target under pressure from farmers and agrochemical lobbies. 

Europeans’ Stories takes you to Charente Maritime, in the west of France. This department is home to a vast cereal-growing plain that consumes a lot of pesticides.

Residents of several municipalities in the region have sounded the alarm: cases of child cancer, some of which have resulted in death, have multiplied in recent years. 

This situation gives Franck Rinchet-Girollet every cause for concern.

His 7-year-old son is in remission from bone cancer, diagnosed 5 years ago.

This former bus driver, now a parliamentary attaché, is Co-Chairman of the association Avenir Santé Environnement (Future Health Environment) set up by local residents who, like him, are fighting to find the cause of their children’s cancers. 

“The reference air quality sensor in the area recorded 33 pesticides in 2019, 41 pesticides in 2021, and the French record for herbicides,” he says.

In October, the Association published the results of toxicological analyses carried out on 72 children from six municipalities in the conurbation.

“Fourteen pesticide molecules were found in the children’s urine and 45 in their hair. Among them, we found a number of banned