myIn March 2022, 11-year-old Emmy died after a seven-year battle with cancer. His mother, Laure Marivain, was a florist. His story, told on October 9 by the world and Radio France highlighted a little-known reality: that of the invisible risks faced by this profession and floriculture employees. Flowers, and in particular those that come from afar, are small toxic bombs, full of pesticides often much more dangerous than those authorized in Europe and, furthermore, present without any maximum residue limit.
Laure Marivain touched flowers during her pregnancy without suspecting for a single moment the risks that she and her son were running, without ever having been informed. However, the danger is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The collective expert opinion prepared in 2021 by the National Institute of Medical and Health Research (Inserm) considers that the link between childhood leukemia and maternal exposure to pesticides during pregnancy is established with a strong level of evidence. As expected, experts from the Compensation Fund for Pesticide Victims (FIVP) admitted this causal relationship, paving the way for compensation for Emmy’s parents.
The creation of the FIVP, in 2020, constitutes “a recognition that pesticides are an occupational hazard that has been neglected for too long”write sociologists Jean-Noël Jouzel (CNRS) and Giovanni Prete (Paris-Sorbonne University), in an article published in March in the journal A.O.C.which was already drawing attention to the flower workers. However, there is clearly something ambiguous in this story.
Low compensation
Firstly, the magnitude of the Compensation Fund is singularly small, as the two researchers point out. The loss of a child or spouse is compensated up to 25,000 euros. Losing a brother or sister? It’s 5,000 euros. A child who loses his parents is entitled to 15,000 euros. This structure, backed by farmers’ social security, compensates victims in a way that is too modest to question the economics of the sectors that use these products (conventional agriculture, flower industry, animal production, etc.). In total, in 2023, 523 people were compensated, for a total amount of just over 13 million euros.
In comparison, the American judicial system, which responds to the same type of situations, seems much more formidable. On October 10, a Philadelphia court sentenced Bayer to pay 78 million dollars (72 million euros) to a single plaintiff, sick from having consumed a single substance (glyphosate). Bayer appealed. But glyphosate alone has forced the company to commit nearly $11 billion so far to amicably resolve tens of thousands of disputes (there are still more than 50,000 pending before US justice).
You have 50.06% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
