There is frenzy in Kampala, especially among the middle class, of a new type of small glass, with near magical powers, claimed to enhance body mood and replenish water and other beverages with lost essential minerals. The glass is believed to have been developed at high altitude.

It costs between Shs500,000- 1,000,000. The glass, whose brand name is withheld, claims to make sick people get nutrients from its use. One pours water and drinks. It is also claimed that carrying it in one’s pocket makes them healthier.

It is one of the numerous products imported into the country based on a new era of advanced research based on nanotechnology, a science that manipulates matter at the scale of atoms and molecules.

The claims are total rubbish of course, and people have been complaining that it doesn’t work, but in much of the developing world there are no real enforceable standards on anything, from baby milk to drugs, or at least nothing that slipping a wad of notes to the right person won’t get around. I’ve seen similar materials, often claiming to be glass or ceramic based which can help with everything from better sleep to sexual stamina.

A major worry is, of course, that any fake or dangerous products making claims to contain nanotechnology tend to pollute genuine products, as we saw a few years ago with Magic Nano, which caused some respiratory problems but didn’t actually contain any ‘nanotech’. Despite that, it was cited as an example of the dangers of nanotech as recently as this month. Unfortunately, fake nanoproducts have the same potential to trigger knee jerk responses as genuine ones.

While we develop all kinds of detailed regulations and testing procedures for nanomaterials, it’s worth considering what the rest of the world has to put up with!

Friends of the Earth in Australia, who have been running a long anti nanotech campaign have just released a new report prompting sensationalist and confused headlines headlines like this – “Is nanotechnology a toxic food nano poison in Australia?“As always, it’s a useful excersise to replace the word “nano” with “chemical”or “nuclear” in order to ascertain whether there is anything specific to nano in these types of reports or whether it is boilerplate anti technology ranting. In this case the answer is initially no.

The report gives a reasonably comprehensive overview of the applications of nanotechnologies to food (for more details see this report)but by half way through falls into the old trap of confusing nanotechnology with genetic engineering and synthetic biology and raising the spectre of self replicating synthetic organisms on the rampage. Using the FoE argument that this justifies a moratorium on nanotechnology, should we also not have a moratorium on information technology, without which we would not have genomics or synthetic biology? In any case, invoking the precautionary principle banning everything that you do not understand is a rather lazy option – doing the scientific studies is much harder, takes longer, but ultimately leads to the responsible use of technologies.

After that the report just plummets into a boilerplate rant with lots of cut and paste stuff about privacy concerns due to nanotech, the benefits of organic farming and railing against inadequate government regulation, which is a real pity after such a bright start and doesn’t add anything new.

Painting the image of a world where evil scientists in league with giant multinational corporations will be ramming toxic things down your throat to make fat profits worked well in the GMO debate in the 90′s, partly because there was a grain of truth in it. In the same way many VCs have spent the last ten years trying to get the dot com business model to work in other areas of technology, many NGO’s have not moved on from the days of GMO’s. One outcome of all the public consultation over the last few years has been that when people understand little about nanotechnology they find it all quite exciting, and aren’t particularly concerned, which is bad news for anyone wanting it banned.

The problem with this type of report is that there is very little scientific evidence to base any arguments on, so much of the shock factor comes from imagining what may happen, rather than being based on reality – it could be ‘gray goo’ or new variant Creuzfeld-Jakob disease all over again.

I also feel rather uneasy with the general tone and the imagery of this kind of report, which often paints science as being something vaguely sinister. Although many people hanker after the kinder gentler days of our agrarian past where household lighting was generated from whale blubber and most medical procedures involved a saw, a pair of pliers, lots of screaming and a painful death from gangrene, we should remember that science has given us some undoubted benefits.

Rather than attempting to terrify a rather uninterested public for the sake of a few headlines, an unbiased assessment of the risks and the benefits without all the moratoria and the rather silly images of scientists injecting fruit with chemicals would be of far better use. The debate about nanotechnology is far less polarised than many of the NGO’s think, with most in the scientific community being both reasonable and responsible rather than rabid transhumamists. Perhaps the real target of the enviromentalists ire should be Ray Kurzweil and the other proponents of various radical forms of molecular nanotechnology who are unable to distinguish Star Trek from reality.

A realistic assessment of how we are going to feed nine billion people without using technology would also be useful. While we in the developed world are rich enough to choose between potatoes grown using excrement or synthetic fertilizer, most of the rest of the world is simply hungry. Wishing an increasingly miserable existence on the developing world may be friendly to the earth, but not to the human race.

The most bizarre water project I came across was a Middle Eastern country which was looking for a (nano)technology based solution. After flying people in from around the world and organising a few days of meetings, the foundation concerned then suggested that we should pay half a million dollars to get the ball rolling.

The Demos forum looks to have almost the same participants as a Meridian Institute forum a couple of years ago which was one of the most depressing meetings I have attended in a long while. Most of the meeting was more concerned about whether the use of the word ‘poor’ was demeaning to people who cannot afford the luxury of clean water, and the rest was taken up with making plans for future conferences and meetings, and the possibility of commissioning a  report with the authors to be chosen on geographical grounds (developing countries) rather than on the basis of having any experience in water or nanotechnology.

It turns out that the backers of many of these initiatives don’t actually have a budget to do anything other than fly people around in order to pass resolutions saying poverty is a terrible thing and that something should be done about it. If thus funding had been diverted to actually trying to develop solutions, we might be a couple of years closer to finding a solution rather than a couple of months away from another meeting.

Each World Nano-Economic Congress has a different focus depending on its geographic location, and some of the key issues addressed in South Africa were health and water, and of course minerals.

What became very clear during the conference is that unlike the rest of the continent, South Africa has a highly developed scientific and technical infrastructure, and is busy implementing a national nanotechnology strategy that is the equal of many European ones, both in terms of its objectives and the per capita funding levels. In addition, the plan has a very clear social agenda, focusing on addressing some of the continent’s largest problems.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in deputy Minister of Science and Technology, Derek Hanekom, they have political buy in from someone who genuinely undertands the technology – a real rarity among politicians anywhere.

Before anyone screams “Frankenfood!!!” it is worth taking a look into some of the applications. There are of course, plenty of applications in processed food, but one has to wonder whether getting worked up about one more chemical going into a product consisting chiefly of hydrogenated vegetable fat and mechanically recovered meat is missing the point.

Most interesting is Erich Windhab‘s work. Windhab used microscale and nanotechnology techniques to fortify salt with Vitamin A, iodine and iron, which are all missing from the soil and hence the foods grown and eaten in rural Morocco. The team  created multiple microcapsules to protect the three types of micronutrients. The capsules were then timed to open up in the gut to release the nutrients.

This triple-fortified salt had no colour change and no off flavours, apparently a major problem in previous trials at getting the community to accept salt fortified using other techniques.

The result, according to Windhab  “was a significant reduction of iodine deficiency and anemia.”

It is a good example of how nanotechnologies can be used to help the developing world, not through attempting to cure diseases or providing free solar energy, but simply by improving basic nutrition.  As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

The basic beef seems to be that while nanotechnology (and presumably traditional pharmaceuticals) could produce “new drugs for malaria, dengue fever and other diseases that disproportionately affect people in developing countries” they probably won’t, for reasons that are primarily financial.

But is this a really fair assessment? There are numerous technologies that will have a major impact on the developing world, but as with any capital intensive R&D from semiconductors to biotechnology, businesses follow the money and applications may then trickle down to the developing world, eventually. It is an area we have been discussing since 2003, although progress is painfully slow.

The Meridian Institute have a service “Nanotechnology & Development News” which highlights a lot of problems, and more importantly solutions that nanotech can engender. This is also an area where governments in the developed world can make a difference by funding technologies and supporting corporate initiatives such as DSM’s Water4Life project.

Nanotechnologies will make a difference to the developing world, and hopefully a positive one, but the history of nanotech gives a salutary lesson – it won’t happen overnight.

Now we are adding a new continent to our list: Africa. The WNEC will hold its first African continent event in Pretoria, South Africa: The World Nano-Economic Congress South Africa.

The reason for bringing the WNEC to South Africa is the same as the reasons why we ran successful events in Dublin, Singapore and Mumbai: South Africa is quickly developing into one of the fastest growing nanotechnology hubs in the world. This rapid development is fueled in part by last year’s launching of the South African National Nanotechnology Strategy, which earmarked R450 million ($61.6 million) to be spent on infrastructure and research over the next three years (Cientifica has partnered with the Department of Science and Technology of South Africa and CSIR to run the event).

But it is also based on South Africa’s industrial base of mining, textiles, and chemicals all of which have something to gain from employing nanotechnology and many of the major tool companies, such as FEI, have set up offices in the country to support this new growth.

If nanotechnology is going to have an impact in Africa, it will start in South Africa. If you want to be a part of that movement, attending the WNEC South Africa would be a very good place to start.

One of the areas where nanotechnologies and chemistry become almost indistinguishable is in the food industry. Chances are that unless you grown your own food, most of what you eat will have had some contact with chemistry, whether it is packed under inert gas to prolong shelf life, or in the case of highly processed food, consists almost entirely of chemically modified raw materials.

It is also a very emotive subject, and while people do worry about GMO’s in food, they tend to care far less about the number of other chemicals that go into food, from hydrogenated oils to flavourings and colourings. Groups such as ETC have sought to exploit these fears with the invention of green goo, a nightmare scenario involving the confusion of nanotechnology and biotechnology.

It’s amazing that people get so worked up about nanotechnologies in food when there is so little on the supermarket shelf that you can buy today. However, a quick glance at the ingredients list on any processed food will show you the impact that chemistry has already had, and in every market, from textiles to plastics, where chemistry goes, nanotech is never far behind.

In order to restore a little sanity to nanofood, we have just produced an in depth analysis of nanotechnologies in the food industry, and the result is that we now have a very clear idea of where and what the effect of nanotechnologies will be, and when.

While the food industry is already a trillion dollar market (that is packaging, processing, safety and additives and not agriculture) nanotechnologies only account for 410 million dollars of that total. However we predict a ten fold increase in the value of nanotechnologies to 5.8 billion dollars by 2012, although this increase is not uniform across every sector. Some sectors are so cost sensitive that nanotechnologies will only have in impact on very high value added products, whereas other markets need a number of nanotechnologies to unlock their potential.

Unlike a few of the other reports we have seen on nanotech and food, and as regular readers would expect, we don’t see desktop nanofactories churning out unlimited free food before 2012. As a result, we are confident that we have finally generated a realistic estimate of the markets for nanotechnologies in the food industry, and may even restore an element of balance to a somewhat overhyped and misunderstood sector.

More details about the focus of the projects will be released in coming months, so we won’t spoil th surprise, only to say that it continues the trend of nanotech programs being matched to local economic requirements, something we have , of course been advocating all along.

In the longer term, the project aims to investigate delivery of antiretrovirals for HIV/Aids patients as well as anti-malarial drugs using the same technology.

“And if you replace cotton, what does that it mean for Africa?” asks Thomas.

“I’m clueless about that one but even if cotton were produced using that technology, we wouldn’t lose out,” Chibonga says, and ruled out any attempts to lobby developed countries to halt the technology from being used on a large scale for cotton and other crops.

“I don’t think we’re talking about something that would become operational very soon and, moreover, we have conservatives who would insist on having clothes made from natural rather than the synthetic cotton,” he says.

“Nylon was a synthetic fibre and it used to be fashionable. But it’s no longer the in-thing and I’m sure that the same fate would befall any fibre produced with nanotechnology.”

Touche!