AFGHANISTAN'S POPPY CROP REDUCED BY TALIBAN

Initial results from a survey of opium-growing areas of Afghanistan in
recent days indicate the Taliban may have succeeded in sharply reducing the
annual poppy crop, astonished U.N. narcotics-control officials say.

Last year, Afghanistan was the world's largest producer of opium, the
material from which heroin is made.

Poppies are now in bloom in the Afghan fields, allowing aerial and ground
surveys to be done across large areas to test the ban on opium production
by the Taliban, the hard-line Islamic movement that rules most of the country.

On Monday, the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention's regional
office for Afghanistan and Pakistan said that surveys in the northern
provinces of Nangarhar, Laghman and Kunar, which together contain more than
25 percent of the total land that had been devoted to the poppy crop, found
no significant signs of cultivation this year.