“I don’t drink the tap water,“ she said, outside a supermarket where she was buying locally-bottled Lafort water. A relatively low-cost brand, Lafort is double the price of an equivalent product in parts of Paris.
Like many contentious issues in Martinique, water is intertwined with questions of class and race, including the prominence of a handful of families descended from white owners of enslaved people.
The government has promised to open up the economy, but activists remain sceptical.
Valls called on the businessmen to be more transparent about profits, saying “unfair” supply chains and opacity stifled the economy. He said the government would soon pass a law to fight anti-competitive practices, building on two bills already in parliament.
Valls’ words “need to be followed by concrete, efficient and sustainable action,“ said Gwladys Roger, a leader of the movement, Gathering for the Protection of Afro-Caribbean People and Resources (RPPRAC), which has led the protests, where placards with images of water bottles and prices have featured.
The regional government led by Serge Letchimy is drawing up a wide-ranging bill to reduce reliance on imports by giving small farmers access to more land. It also seeks to centralise water management to lower prices and encourage investment, Letchimy's office said.
More than 80% of the food on Martinique is imported, mostly from France.
Almost half the farmland is planted with sugar for rum or bananas for export, a situation encouraged by European subsidies.
“We need to redistribute the cards and prioritise those producing for the local market,“ Venitus said, in his banana fields.
In response to a request for comment, the French overseas ministry referred Reuters to Valls' speeches. The Elysee did not respond to a request for comment.
Martinique, which France colonised in 1635, became a department of the Republic in 1946. Its social indicators still trail the mainland.
Around half the households are “water poor” under U.N. guidelines, spending more than 3% of income on water bills, according to a 2017 report by France's sustainable development body. Tap water costs on average 28% more per cubic metre than in mainland France, government data shows.
Drinking water in most towns in Martinique is within bacterial and chemical norms, but does not always meet quality standards, with high chlorine levels and a bad smell and taste noted in some towns, a health ministry database shows.
Water cuts, sometimes lasting for days, further increase costs for people by pushing them to buy bottled water.
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.
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.
Marie-Sainte's packs of Lafort were bottled a few miles from the supermarket.
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.
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.
Clerc declined an interview request and did not respond to questions.
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.
If not, “tensions in society will get worse,“ he told Reuters.
“They are business people. 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.”
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 United States banned it in the 1970s.
Yves Hayot died in 2017. GBH's Assier de Pompignan declined to comment.
In 2023, a French court outraged activists by throwing out a case seeking compensation for victims, after investigative judges said too much time had passed.
The low level of the compensation, set at between 5,000 and 10,000 euros, angered some.
Two of 35 water sources in Martinique present traces of chlordecone, the local health authority says. Soil, river water, the marine environment, and spring water are contaminated in areas where the pesticide was used, according to the French health and safety agency.
“I don’t want to know,“ she said. (Reporting by Layli Foroudi in Martinique;
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