Heavy metal pollution in Guangdong Province, China, and the strategies to manage the situation

*Correspondence: Lars Olof Björn, Department of Biology, Molecular Cell Biology, Lund University, Sölvegatan 35, SE-22362 Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] Guangdong Province in China runs a risk of gradually increasing pollution of its agricultural land and, as a consequence, toxic agricultural products. We concentrate here on the situation for cadmium, copper, and lead. For these metals we describe the toxicology, the current pollution and its sources, and what can be done to improve the situation by cleaning the soil from pollutants, by choice of crops that allocate a minimum of the metals to edible parts, and by switching to non-food crops when other measures do not guarantee food safety.