The World Health Organization estimates that 4.2 million people die annually as a result of external air pollution (World Health Organization 2016) and that each year 3.4 million deaths are related to problems involving poor water quality and sanitation (World Health Organization 2020). However, there is no information available on the number of people who die as a result of exposure to or contact with contaminated soil, either by direct contact, intake of contaminated soil, or the transfer of soil contaminants to food. The little concern shown on these issues may partially be because the effects of exposure to contaminated soils are late and silent.

If we look closely, this can be a significant source of exposure to dangerous contaminants. For example, consider US Environmental Protection Agency data on involuntary soil (soil + dust) intake; with intake estimated as 100 mg/d for children aged 0 to 6 mo, 200 mg/d for children aged 6 to 12 yr, and 100 mg/d for individuals older than 12 yr, considering a life expectancy of 80 yr (consistent with countries such as the United States, Portugal, and the United Kingdom), a regular person would involuntarily ingest 3.5 kg of soil throughout life. If we consider the hypothetical situation in which a person lives in a soil environment with a lead concentration of 300 mg/kg (intervention value for residential soils in Brazil), that person involuntarily ingests more than 1 g of lead throughout life. Does this seem to be a small amount? This is equivalent, on average, to 34.3 µg/d of lead. Here, it is worth mentioning that the US Food and Drug Administration sets a maximum level of lead oral intake of 3 µg/d for children and 12.5 µg/d for adults. This is a simplification of reality because the contaminated sites usually contain complex mixtures of chemical substances.

Recent data indicate that Europe has approximately 2.5 million contaminated sites (van Liedekerke et al. 2014), whereas in China conservative estimates suggest that at least 500 000 contaminated sites cover an area of 12% of the national territory (Brombal et al. 2015). Brazil, a country with continental dimensions and equally robust environmental problems, has not measured the number and area of contaminated sites, despite the need for such measurement as indicated in its legal provision on soil quality. In fact, the first legal provision on soil quality was published 20 yr after the first water and air resolutions. Brazil is divided into 27 federative units, of which only 3 disclose a survey of the contaminated areas (for further details, consult Brazilian environmental laws [Brasil 2020]).

Countries like China and India (Adimalla 2020; Tong et al. 2020) have recently disclosed reviews in which they comprehensively addressed risk assessment and the spatial distribution of soil contamination by metals. Brazil, in turn, has soil intervention values available for only 14 metals. Furthermore, according to the CONAMA Resolution 420, given their continental size and environmental heterogeneity, the federative units should establish background values for contaminants in the soil until 2014. Six years later, only 6 of the 27 states have met the requirements of the law, not including, for example, any state in the Amazon region. Among the states that established baseline levels, the number of metals ranged from 9 to 16.

The scenario for pesticides in the soil is similar to that for metals. Although Brazil is among the leaders in pesticide consumption worldwide, the amount of information on the contamination of Brazilian soils is minimal. Recently, our research group surveyed the concentration and distribution of pesticides in Brazilian soils and found that only 21 studies were conducted in 9 of the 27 states. Even more critical is that the main analyzed pesticides are the already banned organochlorines and that there is no association between the analyzed pesticides and those that have been applied in agricultural practice. This scenario is now even more critical because, since 2019, the number of pesticides released in Brazil has increased above normal.

This gap is accompanied by the current environmental resolution, which includes only chlorophenol and organochlorine class pesticides and their metabolites. Most of these pesticides are already banned in Brazil (Fernandes et al. 2020) and do not include the most‐used classes of pesticides in the country. The scenario is not favorable for the establishment of maximum levels of metals and pesticides but is even more critical for the set of emerging contaminants. Information on environmental concentrations of contaminants such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products, flame retardants, nanomaterials, and drugs is practically nonexistent. The absence of the data suggests that these contaminants will not be incorporated in the short and medium term into the legal provisions.

Therefore, despite Brazil's importance in the environmental health of the planet, government officials do not seem to look at our “ground,” which is reflected in limited legislation that requires urgent updating as well as investment in‐depth research on soil contamination. The decades of inaction in prioritizing the issue of soil contamination in Brazil may remove the country, which is among the 10 largest economies in the world and one of the largest consumers of pesticides, from the global map of soil pollution.