Producers and government set out strategies to ensure food safety and international competitiveness
Peruvian avocado association ProHass is working with Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation (Midagri) to control the presence of cadmium in the country’s Hass avocados.
Last season, the European Union rejected 14 shipments of Peruvian avocados for exceeding permitted cadmium levels.
The public and private sectors have now begun to develop a national strategy to maintain the product’s reputation for quality and safety. The National Strategic Agenda Against Cadmium 2025-2030 is part of a Technical Working Group that includes public institutions such as plant health authority Senasa and the National Institute of Agrarian Innovation (Inia), with the aim of investigating, preventing, and mitigating the bioaccumulation of the metal in soils and fruit, and maintaining access to strategic markets such as Europe, the US and Asia. It will cover actions such as soil and water source mapping, traceability, and practices to reduce plant uptake.
Europe imposes a maximum limit of 0.05 mg/kg for contaminants in avocados, a figure that has placed the industry under greater scrutiny and prompted coordinated responses to avoid rejections and notifications at the border.
According to ProHass, rejections/notifications in Europe have been a major source of pressure on the sector. As a result, it is pushing for a widescale data collection effort to allow producers to make data-driven decisions and ramp up product sampling.
At the end of last year, Senasa published a manual of good agricultural practices to mitigate cadmium in avocado and asparagus Crops. Available on the official Peruvian government platform, it sets out recommendations aimed at reducing the availability and absorption of the metal through soil management, fertilisation, water use, and monitoring.
Research has also been undertaken to study the spatial distribution of cadmium in avocado-growing soils in producing regions of Peru and its relationship with edaphic and geological factors, providing valuable input for designing more efficient sampling methods and prioritising intervention.
