Bolivia tells Coca-Cola to get rid of the word ‘coca’
Posted by Wolfy Becker on March 15th, 2007
(JP-wb) — The Coca Commission of Bolivia’s Constituent Assembly approved on Wednesday a resolution which calls on all international companies, like Coca-Cola, to no longer use the name of their “sacred plant” in its product labels.
The proposal, which is supposed to regulate the usage of the plant’s name, was confirmed today by the commission’s chairwoman, Margarita Terán, ex-leader of Bolivia’s coca growers and member of president Evo Morales’ party called “Movement Towards Socialism” (MAS).
This initiative of the Bolivian government is regarded as the next step in its campaign to manifest the coca plant as a “natural, economic, renewable and strategic resource” in Bolivia’s future constitution. President Morales, who is also an ex-coca farmer, recently announced his intention to increase legal coca cultivation from 12,000 to 20,000 hectares (49,500 acres).
Meanwhile, Bolivia’s vice-minister for traditional medicines, Jaime Zalles, said this week that a delegation of Cuban scientists has arrived in Bolivia to investigate the possible use of coca as a “medical vegetable”.
The approved resolution is the result of a 3-day congress attended by coca production leaders, commercializing companies, and coca leaf consumers. The meeting was held in the southern city of Sucre, which is also the seat of the country’s Constituent Assembly. It shares capital city status with La Paz, the legislative and administrative capital. Sucre is the constitutional capital and also the home of Bolivia’s Supreme Court.
“They don’t let us industrialize the coca leaf and for that reason we think that they (international companies), Coca Cola for example, shouldn’t use the name for its products”, Terán justified. She recalled that during the 1990’s Coca Cola bought from Bolivia four tons of coca annually to produce its “star product”, but the country of Bolivia has “not gained anything, not even additional interest”.
The resolution also requests that the coca plant is removed from the list of the UN’s Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. In addition, it urges the public to realize the plant’s medical value just like the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded in 1995.
During the last weeks, the international community has expressed its concerns over Evo Morales’s policies and initiatives to legalize the coca plant which extract is the raw material for cocaine.
According to a recent report of the U.S. State Department, in 2006 the eradication of illegal coca plantations in Bolivia reached its lowest level in the last decade and since Morales became president in January 2006, the number of cocaine labs more than doubled.
(Source: EFE news agency)
