Are more restrictive food cadmium standards justifiable health safety measures or opportunistic barriers to trade? An answer from economics and public health Eugenio Figueroa B. ⁎ Department of Economics and National Center for the Environment (CENMA), Universidad de Chile, Diagonal Paraguay 257, Of. 1604, Santiago, Chile ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Received 15 August 2007 Accepted 15 August 2007 Available online 19 September 2007 In the past, Cd regulations have imposed trade restrictions on foodstuffs from some developing countries seeking to access markets in the developed world and in recent years, there has been a trend towards imposing more rigorous standards. This trend seems to respond more to public and private sectors strategies in some developed countries to create disguised barriers to trade and to improve market competitiveness for their industries, than to scientifically justified health precautions (sanitary and phytosanitary measures) and/or technical barriers to trade acceptable under the Uruguay Round Agreement of the WTO. Applying more rigorous Cd standards in some developed countries will not only increase production costs in developing countries but it will also have a large impact on their economies highly dependent on international agricultural markets. In the current literature there are large uncertainties in the cause–effect relationship between current levels of Cd intakes and eventual health effects in human beings; even the risk of Cd to kidney function is under considerable debate. Recent works on the importance of zinc:Cd ratio rather than Cd levels alone to determine Cd risk factors, on the one hand, and on the declining trends of Cd level in foods and soils, on the other, also indicate a lack of scientific evidence justifying more restrictive cadmium standards. This shows that developing countries should fight for changing and making more transparent the current international structures and procedures for setting sanitary and phytosanitary measures and technical barriers to trade. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Cadmium Cadmium standards Sanitary and phytosanitary measures Trade barriers 1. Introduction Cadmium (Cd) inputs are mainly from atmospheric deposi- tion, application of biosolids, use of phosphate fertilizers, and from effluents from cadmium-using and recycling industries (Syers and Gochfeld, 2000). While the sources of Cd emissions to the environment have been listed in some detail in many reports (Nriagu and Pacyna, 1998; Jackson and MacGillivray, 1993; WHO, 1992; Cook and Morrow, 1995; Jensen and Bro-Rasmussen, 1992), there have been very few attempts to determine human Cd exposure to its various sources. One such effort is reported by Van Assche and Ciarletta (1993) and Van Assche (1998), who developed a model for Cd exposure for human beings and allocated this exposure to the various sources. The model estimated that the relative importance of various cadmium sources to human exposure is as follows (Van Assche, 1998): phosphate fertilizers 41.3%, fossil fuel combustion 22%, iron and steel production 16.7%, natural sources 8%, non-ferrous metals 6.3%, cement produc- tion 2.5%, cadmium products 2.5% and incineration 1%. Recently, there has been an increasing concern, mainly in the developed world, about exposures, intakes and absorption SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT 389 (2008) 1 – 9 ⁎ Tel.: +56 2 678 3419, +56 2 299 4102; fax: +56 2 275 1688. E-mail addresses: efiguero@cenma.cl, efiguero@econ.uchile.cl. 0048-9697/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2007.08.015 available at www.sciencedirect.com www.elsevier.com/locate/scitotenv