Soda taxes may spread if voters check ballots in California, Colorado

New York

AS Americans vote for a new president on Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of voters in California's Bay Area and Boulder, Colorado, will also decide whether they want levies on sugary drinks, another step towards making soda taxes a norm.

Three cities in California - San Francisco, Berkeley and Albany - and Boulder, Colorado, have become the latest battleground in a so-called "war on sugar" that centres on sweetened drinks. Over 800,000 voters will decide on ballot measures to introduce taxes of one or two cents per ounce on soft drinks on Nov 9, just weeks after the World Health Organization (WHO) advocated that governments should impose these types of levies.