{"id":120737,"date":"2026-08-21T13:29:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T13:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/120737\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T13:29:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T13:29:07","slug":"moroccos-lower-cadmium-fertiliser-bound-for-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/120737\/","title":{"rendered":"Morocco’s lower-cadmium fertiliser bound for Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"

At a phosphate mine in Morocco<\/a>, an excavator tears into the earth to extract a mineral that is at the centre of Europe’s growing concern over cadmium in the food chain.<\/p>\n

Morocco <\/a>holds vast reserves of phosphate, a key ingredient in fertilisers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And state-owned OCP, which has a monopoly over the country’s phosphate industry, says it has developed technology to reduce the amount of cadmium in its products.<\/p>\n

Phosphate often contains naturally occurring cadmium\u2014a heavy metal harmful to living organisms\u2014that can seep into farmland and eventually to food through fertilisers.<\/p>\n

According to the French health agency ANSES, phosphate deposits in Morocco naturally contained high levels of cadmium.<\/p>\n

In France, lawmakers overwhelmingly backed a bill in June seeking to limit people’s exposure to the metal, which can damage the kidneys and has been linked to a high risk of cancer.<\/p>\n

Two-thirds of the world’s reserve<\/p>\n

At a mine in western Morocco’s Sidi Chennane, a 3,000-tonne excavator removes layers of earth to reach the phosphate below.<\/p>\n

The rock is then washed and exported in raw form or processed into phosphoric acid at an OCP industrial complex south of Casablanca.<\/p>\n

The acid is the main ingredient in phosphate fertilisers and is combined with ammonia or other substances, depending on the type of fertiliser being made.<\/p>\n

Since early last year, all OCP fertilisers exported to Europe have contained less than 20 milligrammes of cadmium per kilogramme, according to the company.<\/p>\n

That’s one-third of the European Union’s maximum limit of 60 milligrammes per kilogramme.<\/p>\n

An EU official told AFP that the bloc was “not in a position to verify” whether Moroccan phosphate and fertiliser exports reduced the cadmium content, due to lack of a monitoring system.<\/p>\n

However, the official said OCP “reported” that it had “invested in decadmiation technologies over recent years” to ensure that levels of cadmium in its exports did not exceed 20 milligrammes.<\/p>\n

Europe accounted for 17 percent of OCP’s exports last year, following Asia with 41 percent and the Americas with 31 percent.<\/p>\n

Morocco <\/a>holds more than two-thirds of the world’s known reserves of phosphate with an estimated 50 billion metric tonnes, counting deposits in the disputed territory of Western Sahara<\/a>, which is claimed by the pro-independence Polisario Front.<\/p>\n

The kingdom is the world’s second-largest phosphate producer after China.<\/p>\n

OCP says it lowers cadmium levels by adding “specific additives during the treatment of phosphoric acid”. The metal is captured and separated before the now-purified acid is used to make fertiliser.<\/p>\n

The company has made significant investments in the face of “regulatory approaches that vary from one market to another”, OCP Nutricrops chief executive Faris Derrij told AFP.<\/p>\n

Derrij did not disclose the level of cadmium levels in OCP exports outside of Europe.<\/p>\n

Pollution, geopolitics<\/p>\n

The industry has not only faced the challenge of limiting cadmium levels.<\/p>\n

The process of making fertiliser also generates phosphogypsum, a byproduct containing heavy metals and acidic substances also linked with several health issues.<\/p>\n

OCP plans to build a land-based storage facility by 2027 to reduce discharges of phosphogypsum into the sea and has been researching ways to reuse the waste.<\/p>\n

Excessive use of phosphate fertiliser <\/a>on crops can itself harm the environment, said Sylvain Pellerin, a research director at France’s INRAE agricultural research institute.<\/p>\n

It can lead to water contamination and the emission of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, Pellerin explained.<\/p>\n

The industry is also facing the challenge of securing raw materials needed to produce fertiliser while global demand is on the rise, Pellerin added.<\/p>\n

The US-Israeli war on Iran since late February has tightened fertiliser supplies, much of which in peacetime would have been exported from the Gulf through the disputed Strait of Hormuz<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At a phosphate mine in Morocco, an excavator tears into the earth to extract a mineral that is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":120738,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[233,4,60227,5721,920,16493],"class_list":["post-120737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-europe","tag-agriculture","tag-europe","tag-miners","tag-morocco","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-western-sahara"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}