Candidate vows to subsidize legal coca use

As president of the republic I will subsidize coca. To those who chew (leaves), I will give back 50 percent of the cost.

Bolivia's right-wing presidential candidate Manfred Reyes Villa said Tuesday he would subsidize the consumption of coca leaves if elected next year, but also pledged to cut down on coca planting.

- As president of the republic I will subsidize coca. To those who chew (leaves), I will give back 50 percent of the cost - Reyes Villa told reporters.

At 18 percent in recent polls, Reyes Villa remains 34 points behind frontrunner President Evo Morales, who is also the leader of Bolivia's largest coca-leaf growers union, in the run-up to next year's August 6 poll.

Coca leaves are the raw material from which cocaine can be processed, but they are habitually chewed mainly by indigenous communities in Bolivia and are used in traditional remedies.

Growing small amounts for such purposes is legal.

Outside of coca for chewing, and medicinal and ritual uses - the rest is an excess that is going toward drug trafficking - warned Reyes Villa, saying that tens of thousands of hectares of coca leaf crops needed to be destroyed.

According to a June report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the country's cocaine production increased over the last year by nine percent, for a 113-ton crop.

Bolivian law allows for the production of 12,000 hectares of coca to be produced for legal purposes.