Brussels – The European Union has a serious problem with cadmium, a heavy metal with harmful effects on health that people ingest every day as a result of unsustainable agricultural practices. This warning appears in the working document produced by the European Parliament’s Centre for Studies and Research, which signals the issue from the title of the nine-page mini-report: “Cadmium contamination in the EU: a growing challenge.”
In a nutshell, data from 2026 confirm “chronic EU-wide overexposure to cadmium.” This is a problem, given that the heavy metal is toxic to the human body and causes “irreversible kidney and bone damage.” As the report explains, agriculture is the main cause of this growing and potentially harmful problem: at the EU level, “phosphate fertilisers are the primary source of contamination, and contribute 55 per cent of the cadmium added to EU farmlands annually, causing the toxic heavy metal to accumulate in 45 per cent of agricultural soils faster than it can be removed.”
Almost half of the land used for grazing and farming should therefore be remediated, but it isn’t, and the agricultural sector — despite having received support and measures like few others — continues to fuel a chain of cadmium contamination. The report says this also reflects “current regulations [that] are fragmented and scientifically insufficient,” while the EU executive, bowing to the sector’s demands, has avoided addressing the issue. The European Commission’s May 2026 fertiliser action plan “missed the chance to set stricter targets.”
However, the study calls into question the entire production model, as soil properties and erosion only partly explain the high concentration of cadmium in the soil. It instead singles out human activities, which have “significantly impacted these soils, with cadmium inputs increasing by 50 per cent during the 20th century due to sewage sludge spreading, waste dumping, mining, and industrial emissions, such as those from zinc smelters.”
https://www.eunews.it/2023/07/05/suoli-sani-2050-proposta-commissione-ue/
As a result, in the EU, the average cadmium exposure among adults (aged 18–65) is 2.04 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per week, which is 82 per cent of the tolerable intake set by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) of 2.5 µg/kg of body weight per week. For children aged 1-3, it is even higher (4.85 µg/kg body weight per week), for those aged 3 to 10 years (3.96 µg/kg body weight per week), and for adolescents (2.2 µg/kg body weight per week).
For everyone, the main problem is the food we eat – food grown on contaminated land. The research on this is clear: with regard to cadmium intake, “the main dietary vectors are identical across the EU: cereals and grain products (26.9 per cent), vegetables
(16.0 per cent), and starchy roots/potatoes (13.2 per cent).” Some “made‑in” labels are more harmful than others, since regions with some of the highest average cadmium concentrations are found in Ireland, Germany, Spain, Poland and Slovenia.
The geopolitical aspects of the cadmium issue
because these sources may come with acute geopolitical risk, and this is precisely “the structural
dilemma which the Commission’s fertiliser action plan fails to resolve.”
