BOLIVIA URGES UN TO DEFY WASHINGTON AND LEGALISE COCA

Bolivia is leading a Latin American campaign to legalise coca plants
despite them being vilified by the United States as the source of the
world's cocaine industry.

Under the slogan "coca is not cocaine", politicians, consumers and
growers across the Andes are promoting the leaf's qualities and
calling for coca-based tea, yoghurt, bread, toothpaste, shampoo and
soap to be mass produced and exported.

Its fans claim it helps digestion, provides more vital vitamins,
nutrients and fibre than most vegetables and can even combat obesity.

But the plant has been listed by the United Nations as a poisonous
species since 1961 because it also contains the alkaloid needed to
make cocaine.

Bolivia has this week been arguing the case for legalising coca to the
UN narcotics and crime agency in Vienna and hopes to change its status
by 2008.

Indigenous communities have chewed its leaf here since 2,500 BC and
brewed it as tea to boost their strength and stave off hunger and tiredness.

Even today, Bolivia's tin miners, who work in appalling work
conditions, chew coca around the clock to stay awake and dull pain.

Prsident Evo Morales, a former grower who has campaigned for peasants'
rights to tend the crop, has vowed to crack down on cocaine production
in Bolivia, the world's third largest producer after Colombia and Peru.

But he insists the country should be allowed to grow more coca for
natural, legal consumption.

And in neighbouring Peru a frontrunner in next month's election,
Ollanta Humala, has suggested baking 27 million loaves of bread from
coca leaves for school breakfasts daily.

Small companies in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, have launched
coca-based energy drinks, biscuits, breads and yoghurts, all faintly
green in colour and supposedly providing invaluable nutritional benefits.

And although not officially for export, leaf-shaped coca biscuits are
a popular buy at airport souvenir shops.

Some also claim that the leaf's ability to stunt appetite could
provide a natural cure to the world's obesity epidemic.

Maria Eugenia Tenorio, Bolivia's best known coca cook, even claims to
have lost more than two stone in eight months by eating large numbers
of coca biscuits.

"If Bolivians just started cooking with coca, they could solve most of
the problems of malnutrition here," she said in her La Paz kitchen,
kneading green coca flour into mashed potatoes to make a local version
of gnocchi.

The US spends up to $1 billion a year tackling drugs in the
Andes.

The idea that more coca can be grown in Bolivia without boosting more
cocaine production is "pie in the sky", US officials say.