Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
includes the nanotechnology field, the governments around the world would
have invested through the past 11 years more than 67.5 billion US dollars
in research funds. This amount could reach 100 billion US dollars by 2014.
Currently, public authorities would be investing about 10 billion US dollars
per year in R&D (Cientifica 2011; ObservatoryNANO 2012), a sum that could
increase by 20% in the coming 3 years (Cientifica 2011). Including corporate
research and private funding, which have outspent public investments since
the middle of the 2000s, Cientifica estimates that global investment for 2015
could reach up to about a quarter of a trillion US dollars.
Even if these projections vary considerably from report to report, it should
be noted that the global economic importance of this field is punctuated by
impressive developments. It is not surprising to find a convergence of large
multinational companies, along with a certain number of startups on the
fringes. As Cientifica underlines, “The picture in 2007 is one still dominated
by a large, raw-material-based industry, the nanomaterials being produced
by the global chemical industry and dominated by large multinationals
while more recent start-ups attempt to find higher value niche markets”
(Cientifica 2007). According to Foladori and Invernizzi (2007), “there is [also]
an ongoing centralization process in companies that produce nanomaterials,
reducing small firms and concentrating production in large multinational
chemical corporations.”
This convergence effect can be observed in every sector of nanotechnolo-
gies, markedly in nanofoods. While representing only 10% of the available
nanoproducts, nanofoods is already considered a growing market in the field
of “nano-enabled” products with a relatively high estimated market share (cf.
HKC 2007; Cientifica 2007; Scrinis and Lyons 2007), and a lot of the biggest
worldwide food industries are involved [e.g., Atria (Kraft Foods), Associated
British Food, Ajinomoto, BASF, Bayer, Cadbury Schweppes, Campbell's Soup,
Cargill, DuPont Food Industry Solutions, General Mills, Glaxo-SmithKline,
Goodman Fielder, Group Dannone, John Lust Group Plc, H.J. Heinz, Hershey
Foods, La Doria, Maruha, McCain Foods, Mars, Inc., Nestlé, Northern Foods,
Nichirei, Nippon Suisan Kaisha, PepsiCo, Sara Lee, Syngenta, Unilever, United
Foods] (FOE Australia 2008). At the same time, nanofoods are also a precari-
ous area, notably because of the controversial exposure of the public to these
products (PEN 2011), which remains not addressed within a broader and con-
trolled framework involving not only scientists and industries but also policy
makers, stakeholders, and civilian representatives (Papilloud 2010).
6.2 Nanofood Sector
Nanofoods find their origins in technologies developed for parallel fields
such as pharmaceutical, medical, and cosmetic (FAO/WHO 2009). They are
