The numbers are startling. They reveal the extent of contamination of water resources by pesticides and their degradation products; they also show deep shortcomings, which have persisted for many years, in the monitoring of drinking water. In 2021, according to data collected by The world from regional health agencies (ARS), water agencies or prefectures, approximately 20% of French people in mainland France – some 12 million people – have received at the tap, regularly or occasionally, water that does not comply with the criteria quality. This figure was 5.9% in 2020, according to the Ministry of Health.
Most of this data has been available to the Directorate General for Health (DGS) for several months, but so far has not been aggregated for public release. The DGS declined our interview requests. Their official presentation, scheduled for the next few weeks, promises to be delicate: in a country where the rare deviations from drinking water quality standards are, each year, presented as marginal and harmless, the current situation is as alarming as unexpected. To the point of disturbing former senior executives of the health system.
The former director general of ARS Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Michel Laforcade, retired since 2020, believes that the health authorities have “bankrupt” on the question of pesticides and their degradation products, the metabolites. “There is a lot of self-censorship in the administration, a kind of inability to look at realityhe testifies. One day, we will have to be accountable. It may not be on the same scale as the tainted blood scandal, but it could become the next public health scandal. »
What happened ? Why did drinking water non-compliance concern less than 6% of French people in 2020 and around 20% the following year? No recent and sudden acceleration in the use of pesticides, but a “knowledge shock”according to the expression of Mickaël Derangeon, the vice-president of Atlantic’Eau, the water union of Loire-Atlantique.
Hauts-de-France in the foreground
In 2021, responding to an instruction from the DGS of December 2020, the regional health agencies began to monitor certain metabolites pesticides that were not previously sought after. In the environment, pesticides fragment and recombine with environmental elements to give a whole chemical lineage. For each phytosanitary product placed on the market, there can be up to ten metabolites, some of which are considered “relevant” by health authorities (i.e. potentially dangerous), other “irrelevant”.
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